


All That Remains

by LeSirene



Series: All That Remains in the Universe [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Comfort, F/F, F/M, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Healing, M/M, New Earth, Post Season 7, Slow Burn, clarke being clarke, found family and love, jrat and his team are cowards but i'm not, no beta we die like men, season 7, takes up from 7x08 and a few things from the rest of the season I guess, the happy ending we deserve, we hate canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:27:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 45,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25964335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeSirene/pseuds/LeSirene
Summary: After the Last War, the remains of the human race take shelter in a new planet, and start building societies from the ashes.Clarke forms part of the Local Council at New Polis, and is busy with all kinds of new and not-so-new tasks. She tells herself she is over all pleased with everything, except for the ghosts that haunt her daily. One night, one of her ghosts comes back, hurt and looking for shelter.Inspired by Bastille's beautiful song: Remains (youtube.com/watch?v=RrAuzXCu788)
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, Bellarke - Relationship
Series: All That Remains in the Universe [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1920865
Comments: 149
Kudos: 154





	1. I came here to get some peace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note from the day I started writing this, a few weeks ago: Episode 9 is airing today, but honestly I’m done with Season 7, so I’m giving my imagination a go and trying to fix this mess. This is set around one year after 7x08, but I’m taking all of Season 7 with pins, because the Clarke Griffin and Bellamy Blake (both apart and together) content of the last eight episodes is trash and nonexistent and they deserve so much more. This isn’t a bitter fic: this is my favourite show and I just want to make things right for our guys.

Earth II wasn’t as bad as it had seemed when they first arrived. They still had to adjust to the water being a rich color red because of the algae, and to the only animals around being rodents and lizards, but over all it was Earth-looking and _survivable_ , and that was more than enough for most of them. Adjusting to the new communities and the new rules was going to take some more time than adjusting to the landscape, of course, but they were going to approach the issues one by one.

After splitting the selected land between the people form Bardo, Sanctum, the Eligius crew and Earth, the four little communities were thriving and progressing, and among them everything was more or less friendly. The first months had been the most difficult, it had seemed like they weren’t going to make it, after all, but all of the leaders agreed to work together at last, and so now began the era of peace.

It was strange, to say the least, finally being able to say that they got their chance for _peace_ , of all things, after one hundred and thirty years of fighting and bleeding and dying, but here they were now: building villages and societies from scratch, the horizon clear and the future bright ahead of them.

Clarke still couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe that her people were finally _safe_ , that no one was coming for them, that there were no deadly treats nor monsters lurking in the shadows. Most of all, she didn’t think she deserved being a part of it, but she had long ago learned that this had never been a matter of deserving, but rather about surviving. And surviving was what she did best, as one Apocalypse after another had proven. So she woke up every morning and off she went to make sure that her people had a chance at surviving, too. 

As she walked through New Polis’ main street, the morning foggy and crisp, she saw the villagers starting to emerge from the tents and shelters, the few kids among them making their way to the provisional school. Madi, who had embraced their new way of living far faster than Clarke, kissed her goodbye as they got to the school, and off she went to being a normal kid, at last. The Flame and Sheidheda forever gone, it was her turn of being happy and at peace, and that was, too, more than enough for Clarke.

She continued her path across the village, listing in her head what was to be done that day. The oficial building for the school was almost ready, as where the medical center and Raven’s lab. The residential buildings weren’t going to be ready until a few months in the future, but they could manage. They were grounders, after all, and were well accustomed to sleeping in tents and living amongst nature. Some even seemed _relieved_ to be back at the mud and the trees and the rocks, as if everything was ok now that the strange technology was far away, left in another planet devoured by flames and violence.

Clarke wondered how things were going in the other communities, given that all of them came from more or less functional societies, with hot water and food on demand. She also wondered if they had discovered something important about their new home planet, but then figured she would find out sooner or later, since they had agreed to report all mayor discoveries and events to the General Council.

New Polis’ wasn’t the smallest community of the four, but they still weren’t that many, thanks to all of the fighting they had to do in order to get where they were now. It took her by surprise, some times, when they all gathered for the monthly meeting and she could actually see it: they were three hundred. Only three hundred people, from all of the people from the Ark and from Earth, only three hundred grounders. Some boundaries still existed among them, with the Commanders and Bloodreina gone and their faith shaken to the core, the original clans had emerged back from the ashes, but they were slowly, so slowly, starting to get along.

When she got to the end of the street, Clarke found the Local Council’s tent, two guards posted by the entrance. It felt hypocritical having them there when the Council spent the last eight months talking about peace, but Indra wouldn’t allow it any other way, saying that the appearance of having control was almost as important as actually having control over the community. Clarke didn’t like that idea very much, she was all about letting the people be free now that they were at peace, but Indra had been leading armies since before she could tie her shoes, so everyone was on board with doing things her way.

Five pairs of eyes looked at Clarke when she entered the tent, and she greeted them with a smile that didn’t reached her eyes, which was her default way of smiling nowadays. Indra herself was there, already focused on the rudimental maps of the explored land and the surroundings of New Polis. Sitting around the table were Nate Miller and the three heads from the larger clans: Mor, Georgi and Thea.

“Morning,” Nate said, showing her a smile that was too sincere to be taken for anything but actual kindness. “We were about to begin.”

Clarke reached for the last empty chair and sat across from him. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

They spent the next few hours going over everything that was left to collect, distribute and build, the state of their growing farms and the products acquired from the hunting and fishing parties. Mor, who was in charge of the hunting and the fishing, suggested that his people could go venture beyond their land’s limits, if only to see what laid ahead. Thea was instantly on him, saying that doing so could threaten the accords with the other communities.

“Let them come with us, then,” Mor said, gesturing with his hand in an uninterested manner. “I just want some freedom back, for me and my people. We’ve been held back ever since Kongeda.” Even without looking at them, Clarke could sense the death stares Georgi and Thea trowed in the man’s direction. Mor seemed to notice, too, for he added: “I don’t mean Lexa held us back, I’m just saying that we’ve been living by strict rules for years, and we are in a land of opportunity, now, and maybe… I don’t know, it’d be nice to go for a walk, see if we find anything interesting out there.”

There was a moment of silence in which Clarke weighted everything the man had said. He did have a point, and she couldn’t deny that she was also curious of what they could find in this new planet, but it was far too risky. They couldn’t afford losing Mor’s people, some of their strongest men and women, when they were needed for building and hunting. They couldn’t lose any people, in fact, because their numbers were already so small and they had to populate and work the lands and build an entire civilisation.

“You’ll take six men with you,” Indra said. Her deep voice made all of their heads turn around and face her. “No women, and no young men, either. And you’ll send word to the other communities. They can send you two people each, if they want to be part of the expedition. Everything you find is to be shared in equal parts with them, as stated in the accords.”

Mor nodded. “Of course.”

“Why no women?” Thea asked, brows furrowed.

“Men are… disposable,” Indra answered, and Nate let out a small laugh. “We need the women and the young ones to make more people.”

Clarke was glad she and Indra were on the same page about that, at least.

The days went by, and so did the nights, all smashed in one big never-ending climb towards some kind of normality. One week after Mor’s request, his team was ready to leave, people from Eligius and Bardo among them. She assisted to the little farewell party at the streets, waving them goodbye as they wandered into the unknown, and was thankful that none of her friends had made it to the final cut and everybody was safe within New Polis’ limits. _Most of them, at least_ , a voice in the back of her mind reminded her, because she just couldn’t let herself be at peace.

Indra was only a few steps ahead of her, staring at Mor’s team with that unreadable expression of hers. Clarke considered both a relief and an honor to have her in the Council, for she was experienced and strong and knew how to handle multitudes in times of peace, contrary to her, who only knew how to bark orders and make impossible choices at the literal End of the World.

Something more laid in Indra’s face nowadays, though Clarke couldn’t figure out what it was. Maybe it was the responsibility weighing on her shoulders, or the knowledge that her protégé had chosen to settle in Bardo’s village, away from everything she used to be, instead of going home with the rest of her people. Or maybe it was the pain of loosing Gaia, which Clarke couldn’t even begin to imagine. No one had mentioned the former Fleimkepa in the last months, and even though Clarke felt beyond responsable for her disappearance, there was nothing she could do about that, so she didn’t allow the remorse to make home in her chest.

But as the goodbye-party dissolved and everybody went back to their activities, Clarke couldn’t help feeling that she and Indra now shared more than chairs in the Council and a lot of blood on their hands. Both of them had lost loved ones long before coming to Earth II, and both of them were hurting, even if they didn’t allowed themselves to feel it. Ever.

As soon as she got to her little cabin, Clarke was greeted by the sound of her daughters’ laughing. _That_ was something worth fighting and killing and hurting for: Madi’s happiness. It didn’t surprised her finding Lila with her daughter, that little Trikru redhead who hadn’t care that Madi was an ex-Commander and that her father had died under her watch, back at the battle for Eden. Lila had befriended her as soon as they had settled on New Polis, and now acted like Madi’s shadow, somehow becoming Clarke’s second shadow in the process.

“Oh, no. Did we miss the team?” Madi asked as soon as Clarke entered the cabin. She was sitting on Clarke’s makeshift bed, on top of her sleeping bag, and Lila was sitting on Madi’s, a platter of red berries between them.

“Yeah, they just left.”

“I told you!” Madi exclaimed, now looking at her friend. “I told you they were leaving at noon, not dusk!”

Lila shrugged, a little smirk on her thin lips. “Sorry! My bad.”

“It wasn’t much of a show, anyway,” Clarke offered, starting to take her jacket off. “They’ll be back in two weeks, though, and that may be a little more interesting to watch.”

Madi nodded and hummed. “Yeah, guess you are right.”

The girls resumed their chatter as Clarke tried to figure what to do with the rest of her day. She had always despised the weekends, more now that the village was running smoothly and there were no urgent matters to attend. It was a stupid thing to think, of course, because no urgent matters where a symptom of peace and order, which was their main goal here, but she ached for something to do, somewhere to be. She had once wondered if fighting was all they were, after so long of only knowing that, and was starting to suspect that she finally had her answer.

She could go around the village and ask if anybody needed a hand with _anything_ , although she still didn’t know where she stood amongst the people of New Polis. She wasn’t going to be their de facto leader, like she had been before, because people died under her watch and no one wanted her leading, anyway, but she didn’t know if she could ever become just another neighbour, either. For some she still was Wanheda, bringer of death and a bad omen over all, and to others she was the freak with black blood that had survived Praimfaya and raised the very last Commander in existence. Yeah, there was no chance for her to have a normal life, by any means.

Lila and Madi’s whispers brought her back to reality:

“You ask her, she’s your _nomon_.”

“But there’s more chances she doesn’t say no if it’s you who asks.”

“I’m not going to ask her.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s scary!”

“She’s _not_.”

Clarke resisted the urge to laugh, making herself busy with tiding up the place instead, but moments later Madi was at her side, piking up her discarded extra jacket from its place at the end of her bed.

“So…” Madi started, folding the jacket neatly.

“So,” Clarke echoed.

“We were wondering if you… if I could… maybe…”

“Yes, Madi?”

Her daughter looked at her with big, hopeful eyes, and Clarke knew that, whatever it was that Madi was about to request, the answer was going to be yes.

“Can I sleep at Lila’s tonight?”

Well, that definitely took her by surprise. Clarke couldn’t even remember the last time she had been apart from Madi for more than a few hours, let alone a whole night, but she knew for sure that her daughter had never spent the night at a friend’s house. She had stayed with Raven before, on those occasions when Clarke had to leave town for the General meetings, but never at a _friend’s_ house.

“Uma and Freya are coming too!” Lila added from her place on Madi’s bed, hope glistering in her eyes as well. “It’s a slumber party!”

_A slumber party_ , no less. What an odd concept.

Seeing that Clarke remained quiet, Madi’s expression started to fall, a frown replacing her previous shy smile. “It’s not that big of a deal if I can’t go,” she said, “there’s always next time.”

“No, of course you can go, Madi” Clarke said, placing a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Lila’s aunt is going to be there, right?”

“Yes, ” Lila exclaimed, smiling that mischievous smile of hers. Her aunt was a rather old lady that no one knew how had managed to last this long in their crazy journey across worlds and stars. The woman was almost blind and most definitely deaf from one ear, and probably wouldn’t present herself as much of a parental figure. But this were times of peace, Clarke reminded herself, and Madi and her friends were old enough to take care of each other and fast enough to come get her if anything happened. Lila’s place was just five cabins down the street, after all.

“Then I see no problem in you sleeping there tonight. Just let me know if you need me.”

“You are the best!” Madi celebrated, wrapping her arms around Clarke’s waist and pulling her into a tight hug. “We should go, then. Let’s fetch the others,” she proposed to her friend, and one minute later she had gathered her things and they were out and about, being the normal teenagers they now got to be. “ _Ai hod yu in_ , Clarke!” Madi’s words got caught in the wind as they left, her dark curls bouncing at her back.

Clarke didn’t stay at the cabin for long. After the place was tidy and clean and not a single dry leaf remained in the front door, she decided to force herself to just _go out_. If she couldn’t find anything to do, then she’d go for a walk, or a jog, or she’d go hunting or swimming or climbing trees, anything that kept her distracted. New Polis was quiet and sleepy, the warmth of the bright yellow sun bathing every precarious building and the trees that surrounded the village.

The plants of Earth II weren’t green as the ones she remembered, but at least they weren’t aggressive like Sanctum’s. The leaves were a brownish color and the grass was yellow like wheat and soft like moss. The water from the rivers and the lakes was red like some of the soil she had seen back on Earth, but Bardo’s scientists had assured it was safe to consume, as most of the plants and animals.

As far as they could see, their new home didn’t have seasons, or they changed far too slowly for them to notice yet, so they were stuck on an endless spring that had half of the villagers in and out of the med tent, with allergies and mysterious rashes and bug bites. But it was an over all safe place. There where no predators that they had seen, and the climate seemed nice. It rained every few days, which was both annoying and beautiful, for the storm clouds of Earth II were orange instead of grey and white, and the cloudy sky looked like a day-long sunset.

Clarke walked up and down the main street and popped into all of the main buildings, offering her calloused hands, but found nothing to do. Jackson was on call at the med tent and forbade her of staying around, since she had been on call the previous day. Raven was up to her elbows on grease, trying to get one of Sanctum’s motorcycles back to life, but said she was enjoying herself in the process, no need for help. Everywhere she went, people reminded her that she wasn’t essential, that everyone was fine without her help.

So she ventured the woods. Fallen twigs and dry leaves crushed under her feet, golden sunlight filtering through the tall and robust tree branches. All was calm in the forest.

For some reason, it reminded her of her first days on Earth, more than a century ago: it had seemed like paradise, back then, with beautiful pools of deep, clean water, and greenery all around. Later came the fear and violence and survival, but at first, it had been perfect. Just her and ninety-nine other young criminals, all hungry for freedom. Just her and her people, living day by day. All of her decisions had seemed so big and important back then, and it made her chuckle, because they seemed _almost_ irrelevant now, in the distance.

If she only could tell her young self how long and rocky the path was going to be, if she could tell her about the death and pain and sorrow and guilt, would she had done anything differently? She could had prevented some deaths, most of the pain, but ultimately not the destruction of the Earth. Besides, she had learned long ago that no plan was perfect, something always came up, or someone betrayed them, or someone died. Death, at the end, was inevitable. And so was pain.

Clarke hurried to get herself out of her head, to erase from her memory the gentle sunshine and the contagious laughter and the eyes that had looked at her as if she held the answers to all of the questions. There was no point on dwelling on the past.

Upon arriving to Earth II she had promised herself that she was going to leave everything behind. Of course, she couldn’t help that her past would eventually come knocking on her door from time to time, but she wasn’t going to let it consume her. She was going to leave all of her beloved ones behind, the dead were dead, buried and burned and lost in worlds far away, and she wasn’t going to go looking for them, ever again. But waving goodbye to complete strangers earlier had made her think of everyone she hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye to, and it made her hearth clench with sorrow and her throat burn with unsaid words. So many wounds were still open and bleeding, she was afraid they were going to drain her out someday.

She reminded herself of Madi, who was safe and content, of Raven, whose eyes were bright once again, of Octavia, Hope and Echo, who were safe at Bardo’s village, of Murphy and Emory, who on an unbelievable turn of events were leading Sanctum’s people. She reminded herself that every fight and every war came with victims and loses, but also left behind wins and survivors, and that it was her duty to take care of the living. And the living where doing fine, thriving, building villages and lives from the ashes, learning how to smile and breathe and grow, away from the ghosts of the past.

She picked up twigs and branches on her way back to New Polis, and lit a small fire to keep herself warm during the night. Instead of joining her usual crew for supper, she ate alone in her cabin, and went to bed as the sky turned a dark shade of orange. _We are fine_ , she repeated, again and again, until her eyes closed and she feel into a dreamless sleep. _We are fine_. But it didn’t made her feel any better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!! Thank you for reading this far!
> 
> We are on episode 7x11 right now, and I just wanted to say that I will be taking some of the things we've learned this far from S7, but, like I said, I'm not sticking to them 100%.  
> Feel free to make suggestions in the comments, or simply come by and say hi! English isn't my 1st language so you are very welcome to tell me if I messed up or something along the writing.
> 
> That's it for now. I'll update in a few days! 7x12 will be out by then and we can cry about it in the comments, too, if you feel like it.
> 
> See ya! Xx Le Sirène


	2. I know you're just a memory

Hello! Please ignore this chapter, sorry for the inconvenience! I had a formatting problem and had to move things around. Nothing is missing and nothing's been added; what used to be Chapter 2 is now part of Chapter 1.

Again, I'm so sorry for the inconvenience. Hope you enjoy the ride!!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See ya! Xx Le Sirène


	3. I came here for sanctuary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter gets sad before it gets (a little) better. Read until the end for a surprise :)

At that point in her life, Clarke was more than used to the nightmares. Her repertory included Finn’s red blood damping her cold hands, Lexa dying in the same bed they had shared, her mother and her father being floated, Bellamy being swallowed by a flash of light that left no body behind, Madi breaking under Sheidheda’s influence. The past she desperately tried to get away from during the day came back to haunt her almost every night, so she wasn’t surprised when she woke up crying and screaming, covered in sweat and eyes full of tears. Her first instinct was to reach for Madi, and panicked when she found the bed next to hers empty. It took Clarke another moment to remember that Madi was at her friend’s house.

She panted, trying to calm down her heartbeat. It was a good thing she was alone, because Madi always got scared by her nightmares, and then both of their nights got ruined. This time it was just her and her dark cabin, the cold air of the night drying her sweaty brow. Clarke breathed in and out, in the night and out the fear. In and out. In and out. Until her breathing became stable and her hands stopped shacking, her heart still pumping rampantly in her chest.

The dream remained vivid in her head: all the people that had died on her watch along the years had found their way to Earth II, and they were thirsty for her blood. Her friends’ and enemies’ and allies’ severed bodies, covered in red and black blood, chased her across New Poli’s streets, and she screamed but nobody came to her rescue. She could see Bellamy’s corpse leading the mob, his wounded hands getting closer, closer, until his fingertips almost touched her. She had screamed the loudest then, terrified at the sight of his bloodthirsty eyes, so similar and yet so far away from the man she had called her best friend and closest ally for the last century.

Clarke was a logical person, she knew her own mind was responsible for her nightmares, but still felt like the dream was trying to tell her something. Maybe it was reminding her of how lonely she was. Yes, she had Madi and her friends, even had the Council on her side for when it came to the life-or-death stuff. But she felt _so alone_ , at the same time, with no one to talk to about the things that filled her head and her heart. If Octavia was in New Polis, then maybe she could talk things out with her, because she knew how dark the shadows could get. But Octavia was healing her own wounds, and the only other person she could talk to, deep and long and wholeheartedly, was dead. Truly and utterly dead, with no chances of coming back. So she buried her face in her pillow and cried, because that was another of the things she was more than used to, in those times of peace.

As hot, silent tears filled her eyes, Clarke could see how the world around her became blurry, the shapes and shadows escaping her and leaving her alone, once again. She wasn’t sure _what_ was the actual cause of her tears, because there were multiple reasons for her to fall apart. Day and night, awake and asleep, she could always feel her body at the brink of breaking, the pieces that had once constituted her barely keeping together. Her edges where sharper than ever, and her soul felt _tired_. Tired or fighting even the smallest battles, tired of faking that she was all right, tired of pretending she wasn’t in pieces, tired of _surviving_ , or _living_ , or _whatever_ it was that she was currently doing. She just wanted to sleep a dreamless sleep. Forever.

But her people depended on her, even if no one liked to acknowledge it. That’s why, when the golden sun finally appeared on her window, she would get up, and she’d keep fighting, faking, pretending and surviving, so her friends’, enemies’, and allies’ sacrifices wouldn’t be in vain.

The following Wednesday morning was gloomy and cold, as most of Earth II’s mornings were. The sky was a dark shade of dusty orange when the Local Council lined up at the doors of the new hospital, ready to inaugurate it before the activities of that day started. They had just finished the building the previous night and some smaller details were incomplete, but they really needed to get things going. The weather appeared to be getting colder, at last, and more and more people were in need of medical assistance everyday.

Councilwoman Georgi, who had once been her village’s healer, stood tall and proud as she opened the hospital’s doors for all of New Polis to see, and invited them in for a guided tour. Most of the villagers decided to leave the ceremonial act at that, and went about with their days, but Clarke followed her inside. It didn’t surprised her seeing Madi and Lila doing the same, quickly joining her side as they walked through the building’s hallways.

It wasn’t really a hospital, more like a very big first-AIDS station, with a few rooms for patients to recover and rest in, an emergencies ward, and even a single, fully stocked operating room, courtesy of Bardo. Later would come the actual hospital, in the meantime they still would have to keep sending the most delicate patients to Bardo, but they could attend urgent matters there, which was a relief.

Jackson, who had been by Georgi’s side the whole tour, approached Clarke with a small smile, eyes filled with a sentiment Clarke couldn’t figure out.

“Hey,” he said, voice tentative. “How are you feeling?”

Clarke had tried to return his smile as a greeting, but his words confused her, leaving her with a strange expression that was between a smile and a question mark.

“I’m… good,” she answered, because that was, for sure, the answer he had been looking for. “It’s going to be so good having this place working, right?”

“Yes.” Jackson’s eyes wandered. He looked at Madi, who was talking with Lila and Freya, Georgi's ward and apprentice, on the other side of the room, and then returned to Clarke, his expression somehow softer than before. “She would’ve loved it, don’t you think? All that time working in bad conditions and battle fields, and now we have this,” he gestured to the whole building.

It took Jackson’s words one moment to go through Clarke’s mind, and when she processed them, they left her with a feeling of anguish that knocked the air out of her lungs. Her mother, the Ark’s last actual doctor, would have loved the hospital, rudimentary as it was. She would have loved the prospect of a clean, safe environment to work in, and for the patients to be treated and recovered in.

“She probably would’ve said this is better than the Ark, even though it isn’t,” Clarke managed to say at last, after being in silence for so long that Nate had, too, approached the conversation. Both men laughed, Jackson’s face gaining a better colour now that his boyfriend was by his side.

“This place is _way_ better than the Ark,” Nate joked. “And a million times better than other places we’ve been in.”

“If she only could see it.” As soon as Clarke spoke, she could feel how the mood went back down, a million other things left unsaid. “I know she’d be really proud of you, Jackson,” she added, “you’ve come so far on your own.”

“I’m not on my own. I’ve got you, and Georgi, and we’re going to train a lot of people, now that we have this place.”

“She’d be really proud, either way.”

“Oh, come on,” Nate said, gently nudging her arm, “she’s proud of you, too.”

Clarke shrugged, not sure if that was true. Hadn’t been her mom the first one to give her the speech about _being the good guys_? She hadn’t felt remotely _good_ in the longest time.

“She would’ve made a better job than me,” she admitted. “Kane, too. He was the best leader we ever had.”

Nate looked at Jackson and Jackson looked at Nate. Nate shrugged and Jackson shook his head. Something was being exchanged in that moment, silent words transmitted in the air between them, a conversation just for them to understand. Clarke wondered how did that feel, to be so close to someone that no words are needed. With a painful sting, she remembered that she _did_ know how it felt, how it had been to be a part of a whole, something bigger, brighter than herself.

“Kane was a… very good leader.” Nate’s voice was soft yet firm. “But he wasn’t our best leader, and he isn’t the reason we are where we are, right now. There are certain decisions that can only be made by certain people.”

Clarke realised that Nate was right, of course: in order to survive, sometimes they had to let the monsters make the hard choices, if only to let the others be free of sin.

Clarke’s sleep was disrupted for the second night in less than a week; this time, someone was banging at her front door. She jumped from her bed and threw a jacket over her clothes, Madi copying her only a second later. She gave her daughter a warning glance before crossing the small room that was their home.

On the other side of the door Clarke found Hypnos, one of the village’s guards, his hands rested on his knees, his mouth was open and gasping for air.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, worry and alarm already filling her legs, preparing her to run towards the source of danger.

“They are back,” he managed to say. “The team.”

Clarke started to go trough all of the reasons why the men that had left less than a week ago could be back so soon, but couldn’t find a reason that didn’t involve danger.

“It’s too soon. What happened? Were they attacked?”

Hypnos shook his head and finally gathered himself enough to stand properly. His grey eyes held the same questions hers did.

“Don’t know yet,” he admitted. “We spotted them some miles ahead. It’s only a few of them, four or five, and one is wounded.”

All of her alarms started shouting _danger danger danger danger_ , and even though most of her being begged her to stay by Madi’s side until the coast was clear and they knew what they were against, she knew what she had to do. From all of the members of the Council, she lived the closest to the village’s limit.

“Go ahead,” she told Hypnos, motioning to the west entrance, where Mor’s men were most likely coming from, since they had left that way. “I’ll take Madi to her friend’s house and I’ll catch you guys there.”

Hypnos looked at her for a moment too long, as if weighing something in his head, but nodded and cleared her front door, taking one step towards New Polis’ west entrance.

“Don’t take long. Please.” And then he was again sprinting through the night air, thick with the smell of the early morning dew.

Clarke took one, two seconds to gather herself, and then turned to her daughter, who was looking at her with a mixture of worry and determination.

“I’m coming with you,” Madi said, as Clarke had expected she’d do.

“No way. Get your shoes, you are staying at Lila’s until I figure what’s going on.”

Despite the ungodly hour, a lot of the tents and cabins along the main street had candles and lamps alight, curious eyes peeking from the windows and brave, or maybe reckless, bodies standing outside, all trying to figure what the movements at the end of the street meant. As she got closer to the entrance, Clarke could see the dark shape of the group of guards that tended the newcomers. She braced herself for the bad news, for the crisis, for the possibility of a nasty desease or a deadly treat coming for them.

But she could’ve never in a million years been ready for what she encountered at New Polis’ gates. Two of the guards held a wounded, yet strong body on their arms, dressed in layers of what looked like animal’s skins, and Hypnos was talking to the other four, who seemed to be fine. The source of her astonishment came when the wounded one saw her, desperately pushed aside the guards that held him, and then sprinted towards her as if he was on fire and she held a bucket full of water. She saw him getting closer, and was ready to defend herself in case he was foe, but then the village’s warm lights illuminated his face.

Long, dark curls framed freckled and scarred cheeks. A grown beard covered half of his face, but she could’ve recognised him anywhere, in any world and wearing any face, only for the way in which he looked at her. Those tired, bright, puffy, determined brown eyes belonged to Bellamy, and to Bellamy alone.

And that one was _Bellamy_ , brought back from the dead. _Bellamy_ , running towards her despite his injuries. _Bellamy_ , reaching for her, grasping her hands as his body finally gave in.

“ _Clarke_ ,” he whispered as he fell to his knees and then to the ground, the weight of his body dragging her down until she was kneeling in front of him, his head coming to a rest on her lap.

Only then, as she held her unconscious best friend in her arms, Clarke managed to process what was happening. She looked at him in awe, recognising he shape of his nose, the marks on his brow, and then looked around to check if the others were seeing the same, or if this was another cruel, yet beautiful dream of hers. But she found in the faces of the guards the same surprise she felt coursing through her body.

“Get a doctor,” she babbled, her voice threatening to break. “Call Jackson! Georgi! Someone! Please! _Please!_ ”

Two guards separated from the group, and Clarke saw them running into the village. Then she scanned the others, trying to find answers, any answers, in their silhouettes. That’s when she found another face she hadn’t expected to see again.

Gaia’s hair was longer, it’s tips still white. She was smiling, her eyes shining with tears, her hands placed on her stomach. Clarke feared Gaia was about to be sick, maybe as overwhelmed as she felt, but then she noticed how far away from her body her hands rested, and her head filled what her eyes couldn’t quite see in the dim light: Gaia was pregnant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!! Thank you for reading this far!
> 
> You may have noticed that I added the tag “slow burn” up there, and also extended the chapter count. Honestly, how could we have Bellarke without a little (or a lot of) slow burn?
> 
> A/N from the hospital scene: Miller was meaning to praise Clarke for being their BEST leader, but she twisted his words, bc she doesn’t think she is. Clarke, my girl: you ARE the best of the best, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
> 
> And yes, I’m leaving you with that cliffhanger, because why wouldn't I, when I have the chance? See ya soon! Le Sirène Xx


	4. My thoughts seem to wander

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ready for a long(er) one? Here’s a highlight: “Well, you look like you just crawled out of your fucking grave.”

Despite the years upon years she had spent carrying the world on her shoulders, Clarke couldn’t remember a night more stressful than the one of Bellamy and Gaia’s resurrection. Maybe “resurrection” wasn’t the right word, since apparently they had never been dead in the first place, but for Clarke it very much felt like a resurrection.

As the guards carried Bellamy’s unconscious body to the hospital, Jackson shouting orders as soon as they arrived, Clarke blindly followed them, unable to look at anything but his face. He had dark circles under his eyes, his skin was sunburned and dirty, and his bottom lip had a small cut. And for some reason all Clarke could think about, the only thing on her head, was if that cut was deep enough to leave a scar. It was stupid, of course, Bellamy was back from the dead, or whatever, and that was the only thing she could think about.

Maybe it was a coping mechanism to avoid the other urgent, disturbing matters that the night had brought. Like the bullet that was currently buried on his thigh, courtesy of one of Mor’s men, who had shoot him on sight thinking he was a predator. Or _how on Earth II_ had he and Gaia managed to travel between worlds. Or Gaia’s swollen womb. Yes, Bellamy’s injured lip definitely was the best, least scary thing to hyperfocus on at the moment.

Strong, gentle hands held her by the shoulders, stoping her at the door of the operating room as the guards kept walking, taking Bellamy with them. It was an effort to peel her eyes away from Bellamy, who was currently being laid on the table, and to look at Jackson.

“I’ll take it from here,” he said, in a tone that didn’t allow disagreement.

“No…” Clarke heard herself say, nevertheless, looking for Bellamy’s figure once again. “I’ll take care of him.”

“No, I’ll do it, Clarke. You are too emotionally involved with the patient.”

Her head snapped at him. “The _patient_?” she repeated. “That’s not a patient, Jackson, it’s Bell… _it’s Bellamy_!” Her voice thinned at the mention of his name, the dam that held her emotions in check threatening to break. “You can’t… I can’t… I will help him. I _have_ to help him. I have to keep him _alive_.”

Jackson’s eyes were gentler than ever as they laid on her’s. “I promise I’ll call you as soon as he is out,” he said. “I’ll take care of him while you check on Gaia, ok?”

Clarke didn’t have time to agree or disagree or to scream, one more time, that it was _her duty_ to _save Bellamy Blake_. Jackson had slipped inside the operating room faster than she could process, and left her alone in the hallway, facing a closed door. Deep down, she knew he was right, her emotions could play against her while operating, it’d be naive and reckless of her think otherwise. But she could barely keep herself together now that she couldn’t keep an eye on Bellamy.

Not even in her craziest, most desperate dreams had she imagined that she’d get to see him again, to hear his voice, to hold him in her arms. It was all starting to fall on her now: he was alive. _Bellamy was alive._ After months of mourning and crying in secret and hating the Universe for punishing her in such a cruel way… he was back.

She got herself busy, because otherwise she’d fall to the ground, crying _again_ , and she didn’t have time to feel. She had a very pregnant patient to treat.

Clarke found Gaia a couple doors down the hall, a woman that she recognised as one of the hospital’s volunteers by her side. When she saw Clarke, the woman muttered something about going to fetch someone and then exited the room in silence. That left Clarke alone with Gaia, who was smiling at her in a comforting yet wary manner.

“It’s so good to see you again, Clarke,” Gaia said, extending one hand towards her. Clarke grabbed it out of reflex, and found it more pleasing that she had expected; it was warm and steady, her pulse strong. “Are you here to check on me?”

“Yes, Jackson said…”

“Is he with Bell?”

Clarke tried not to act surprised at the use of the nickname. “Yes.”

Gaia nodded and sat on the wooden cot that was at her back, her muddy boots dangling in the air. It struck Clarke then how much Gaia must had gone through, being pregnant in an unknown environment, having to survive while carrying another human life inside of her body and dealing with the complications of a pregnancy.

“How far long are you?” Clarke started with the usual protocol, not allowing herself to wonder about _where_ the baby had come from.

“About six months, I’d say, but I’m not completely sure, since…” Gaia gestured to the room, but Clarke could understand she meant the whole planet they were currently standing on.

“Is this your first pregnancy?”

“Yes.”

“Had any bleeding during the last months?”

“No.”

They continued the questioning while Clarke checked Gaia’s vitals, listened to her heart, her lungs and her womb, searched her for any rashes or wounds that came with the life outdoors, but at the end she found the soon-to-be-mother in perfect health.

“I’m not surprised,” Gaia said, that perpetual, easy smile on her lips, “they didn’t let me as much as pick up wood since we found out about the baby”

“ _They_?”

“Oh, right, you have no idea.” Gaia’s cheeks flustered a little. “There’s four of us. Bell and I, and then two men from Bardo. Do you know what Bardo is?”

“I’m aware.”

“Well, Maximus and Doucette are from there. They accidentally crossed the bridge with us, and we all ended up… here.”

“On Earth II.”

“That’s how you call it?”

Clarke could only nod. So Bellamy and Gaia hadn’t survived this long on their own, and there was more people somewhere outside of their community. Maybe they had discovered something useful, and with a little luck they wouldn’t threaten their new-found normality.

“The first year we called it by the name of _Etherea_ ,” Gaia kept saying, “thinking we were meant to complete the Shepherd’s pilgrimage, but later we discarded…”

“Wait, what?” Clarke exclaimed. “What do you mean ‘the first year’? How long have you guys been here?”

Gaia stared at her for a long moment, a shadow crossing her face. “We arrived three years ago.”

The room was spinning. No, the whole _planet_ was spinning under Clarke’s feet. She placed one hand on the cot and then forced herself to sit next to Gaia, because otherwise she risked just falling to the ground. After their experience with Bardo, Skyring and Sanctum, the concept of time dilation wasn’t new to her, but she couldn’t imagine what Gaia and Bellamy must’ve gone though, being there for so long, stuck on an unfamiliar place and not knowing if they’d ever get back to their friends and families.

“For us, it was chance,” Gaia continued, not noticing or not moved by Clarke’s shock, “but may I ask how did you all end up here?”

“The Stone,” Clarke managed to mumble, the words heavy on her tongue. “Cadogan did something. The Last War’s code. Then we were here.”

“The Last War?” Gaia repeated, and in her tone she held more understanding and emotion than what Clarke could grasp. “Is it over? Did the Shepherd save us all?”

“I… I guess.”

Before Clarke could question why did the last Fleimkepa call worlds-sized scammer Bill Cadogan by the tittle of the Shepherd, someone knocked at the door, and then opened it before getting an answer. It was one of the men Clarke had seen at New Polis’ entrance. This time, she noticed that he was clothed with animal’s skins, like Gaia and Bellamy, and that he wore the Disciple’s markings on his face.

“Max!” Gaia exclaimed, standing up with only a little effort. “Are you all right?”

The man crossed the room and reached for Gaia’s face, cupping her cheeks with such care that Clarke’s turned pink, sensing that the caress was more intimate than what it seemed. Next thing she knew, the man was delicately placing his lips on Gaia’s. _That_ answered the question of where had the baby come from, then.

“I’m good,” he answered. “They wanted to question me about the rest of their men, but I told them they are safe with Doucette.” His eyes travelled to her stomach. “Is the baby ok?”

Gaia nodded. She was grinning again, both of her hands placed on top of the man’s. Then she tuned to Clarke and gestured towards her.

“Clarke, this is Maximus. Max, this is Clarke Griffin.”

The man’s eyes widened, if in surprise or in horror, Clarke couldn’t tell. He just kept staring at her until it became uncomfortable. She was about to come up with an excuse to leave when he finally spoke:

“I’ve heard so much about you. They told me about all the things you’ve done for your people, to save them.” Maximus placed his hands on his chest, now, and slightly bowed with his head. “It is an honour to meet the lady from the tales, at last.”

Clarke didn’t know, truly didn’t know, how to react to the man’s declaration. What had they been feeding him? _Lies_? But of course Bellamy would’ve tried to make her look like a good guy, and Gaia, too, since she was the last Commander’s mother and protector. Before she could bring down the pedestal they seemed to have mounted her on top of, a familiar, scarred face appeared at the door, and Clarke knew it was her cue to leave.

“Gaia?”

“Mother!”

Of course Clarke trusted Jackson, of course she knew he’d take good care of Bellamy. But one thing was to take his word for it and another was to actually see that Bellamy was safe and sound, fresh out of surgery. Everything had gone fine, and he was awake and responding, just a little disorientated from the anaesthetic.

“We gave him a small doze, since he was already out,” Jackson explained as he dried his hands with a towel that had Bardo’s phoenix embroidered in silver thread. “In an hour he’ll be completely lucid, though I would recommend he got some sleep before you start with… questions and stuff.”

Clarke nodded, unable to do anything else. She had spent the last eight months swallowed by an unstoppable frenzy, her head always thinking and turning and analysing, but now she was numb. Completely numb. She couldn’t even sort out her emotions. Was she happy? Was she desolate? All she could perceive was an all-consuming _silence_. As if a bomb had exploded near her, leaving her half deaf and half stupid and a hundred percent lost.

Her feet followed Jackson to a new recovery room. He motioned for her to go inside and then left, his footsteps echoing in the deserted hallway. The door was open, and the room was empty except from the body that rested on one of the beds, the other one unoccupied. How ironic was it, that the hospital’s very first delicate patient was a dead one? Clarke shook her head. Bellamy wasn’t dead. He had never been dead.

She couldn’t help the tears. And who could blame her? She started crying, right then and there, still standing at the threshold. _She_ could’ve died from pure joy, just seeing him conscious, a trembling, weak smile on his chapped lips as he turned his head and looked at her through the anaesthetic-induced stupor.

“Hey,” he said, voice low and hoarse.

Her chest contracted with a painful spasm at the sound of it, but at least she was feeling _something_ now, her head and her heart finally catching up with the recent events. The sorrow, the pain, the nights upon nights she had spent mourning him; everything disolved in a wave of relief bigger than that damned planet.

“You are alive,” she whispered, not even caring when her voice broke.

“I know. You too.”

And it was that, that sample of his generosity, of the way in which he had always cared and worried about her wellbeing, what made her leap forward, stepping into the room and then trowing herself at him. Bellamy caught her, because of course he would, and pulled her in, so that her head rested on top of his chest, the rest of her body half-laying in the mattress. One of his hands caressed her hair while the other found her back, and hugged her as tightly as he could.

It may had been her imagination, but she could swear Bellamy breathed her in for a long moment. In and out, as if he was trying to recognise her by smell alone. She did the same. In and out. He smelled of dried blood and dirt, which wasn’t so far off from his regular scent, back on Earth. But underneath the traces of the life outdoors she found the scent she had tried to reminiscent every night for six years, back when they had been separated for the fist or second or hundredth time. She found her best friend, the man that had saved her life more times that she could count. It made her, if anything, cry even harder. And he held her tighter, too, pulling her broken parts together until she could almost, _almost_ , pretend she wasn’t shattered into pieces anymore.

Later would come the questions, the explanations, the exchange of stories about grief and survival. For now, Clarke hid her face on the sheets that covered his body and allowed herself to be weak, for she had him to be strong for her, even if it only was for a couple of hours.

Bellamy slept soundly through the rest of the night and didn’t wake up until the midmorning, looking less pale and overall more alive, which had become Clarke’s new favourite adjective. Raven had appeared at the room around dawn and sat next to Clarke on the extra bed, both of them too shocked to even talk about their friend’s return. In silence, they held hands and kept watch until Bellamy started to stir, waking up from his heavy sleep and asking for water. Raven went looking for a glass while Clarke helped him sit, placing a pillow at his back so he could recline on it.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he told Raven when she came back with the water.

“Well, you look like you just crawled out of your fucking grave.”

“Pretty sure I’ve looked worse,” he laughed, and then Raven was hugging him, no tears on sight but a bright, wide smile on her lips.

“When Miller came looking for me, I couldn’t believe it,” Raven said, releasing him so her sharp eyes could scan him from head to toe. “I still can’t believe you are here. Like, _how_ are you here?”

Bellamy told her the same story Gaia had told Clarke earlier. He told her about the Stone delivering them to that strange place, and then it going silent. No matter how much Doucette, who was a Stone Conductor, tried, they couldn’t get the Stone working, so they couldn’t go back. They spent the first few moths trying the impossible to go back, but later figured out there was virtually no way to do so.

“It was really hard,” he said, looking at them one at a time, “to realise that we’d never see any of you guys again. But we had to keep moving, surviving, you know? Max and Doucette had this theory about a second Stone, up in the mountains, but we never found it. Eventually we… We gave up. Accepted this was it.” His eyes were glued to the bed sheets now, his cheeks slightly pink and his head downcast.

“Hey,” Clarke intervened, schooling her voice to be as soft as she could manage without whispering. “Everything is fine now. You found us.”

Bellamy looked at her with eyes filled with awe, as if the, too, couldn’t believe their luck.

“How’s everyone?” he asked. “Madi? Octavia?” His skin paled again, and his eyes wandered around the room, as if his sister was about to materialice from the shadows. “Where is she, Clarke?”

“She is not here,” she answered, and then hurried to add: “But she _is_ in the planet! She’s in Bardo’s village.”

“Bardo? Why?”

“Oh boy.” Raven whistled. “You missed on all the drama.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!! Thank you for reading this far!
> 
> I always felt like canon!Gaia may be gay, or bisexual, perhaps. But I couldn’t resist the whole pregnancy thing and her having a baby with a Disciple and their religions mixing, so let’s settle for bisexual, ok? At least for this universe. I’ve written so little about Maximus, but I think I love this soft boy already.  
> Sorry for the amount of new characters I’m introducing (Mor, Thea, Georgi, Max, Madi’s friends, etc), but I felt like I needed to expand the cast, since the originals are split between the four villages. I promise they will appear soon!! (If you ever get lost with the new ones, feel free to ask about them, so I can clear things up for you!)
> 
> There you go with a little Bellarke reunion ;) More to come in following chapters!!
> 
> Thank you again for reading. See ya soon! Xx Le Sirène


	5. In these four walls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Highlight: "You sound happier."

Much later that day, after half of the village had come say hi to their new and not-so-new guests, Bellamy started asking questions. Clarke tried to explain the whole thing about the Last War as clearly as she could, but the truth was that everything had happened so fast that she didn’t remember much. There had been sacrifices and expiation, and a blinding white light, and then Bill Cadogan had delivered them to this new world. And then he had disappeared. And that was that. They were left to deal with a virgin land and a thousand disoriented people.

Bellamy knew a few bits about Bardo’s religion and cosmogony, so he understood the general concept of the Last War, but admitted that he hadn’t payed that much attention to Gaia’s boyfriend preaching about The Shepherd’s Passage. Clarke filled in the blank spaces as well as she could, and then proceded to talk about more normal stuff, like land limits and how things worked around the villages.

She extended on top of the sheets and across Bellamy’s legs her hand-drawn map and gave him a moment to look at it.

“We arrived eight months ago,” she explained. “We settled near the Stone and camped there while the scouts explored the zone. They found the Big Lake, and we decided to split the land around it.” She motioned to the map, pointing as she said: “We are here, at the West coast. The ground is rich and there’s lots of forest and animals, so we hunt, plant and harvest. Bardo is on the oposite side, to the East. They have the most advanced tech, so they are in charge of producing and distributing machines and that stuff. Eligius is to the South.” She pointed to a drawing of mountains, the same snowy peaks that could be seen from New Polis’ streets. “They found granite and iron, so they are back to mining, and they work the metals a little, too. Nothing sophisticated, though.” A little smile appeared in Bellamy’s mouth as Clarke’s fingers traveled to the last village. “And Sanctum is at the North. They have so few people, it’s almost sad. We offered them to come settle with us, but they refused. They harvest and work grains, and will make fabric and clothes once the cotton plants grow.”

When she looked back at him, Bellamy was looking at her with an intensity she couldn’t identify, his eyes full of sentiment despite his still weak state.

“Looks like you have everything figured out,” he said.

Clarke found in herself the strength to laugh. “Not by chance. But we are working on it. And it’s been difficult, but day by day we…”

“I’m so proud of you,” he interrupted, his hand softly landing on top of hers, still on the map. “You’ve accomplished so much, with so little.”

“It wasn’t just me,” she babbled, taken by surprise by the kindness in his words, by the fact that him, who had survived in an unknown planet for almost three years, was proud of _her_. “We have the Council. And the leaders of all the communities are willing to work together; they’ve been so helpful. We are the last of the human kind, after all. This time for real…”

“I’m sure they tried to help you,” he insisted, “but all of this planning and organisation has your name all over it.”

Clarke felt her cheeks blush, the hand under his’ starting to feel as heated as her face. It had been so long since the last time she talked with someone who knew her, truly knew her, enough to find her fingerprints scattered around the last human settlement in the known Universe and not judge her for that. She felt brave enough to look at his face again, knowing that she’d always find a friend in him, no matter the time they were apart. His eyes remained dark, shadowed by those things they hadn’t have the time to talk about yet, but his lips offered her a smile that was all shades of Bellamy.

“It would’ve been easier…” She choked on her words, cleared her throat, and started again: “It would’ve been easier with you here. Making important decisions on my own sucks, you know? I needed you so much.”

“You’ve always had it backwards.”

Something in his voice, or in his face, or in his being, or in the way in which he squeezed her hand, awoke a distant memory in Clarke. She felt the pieces of a big, Universe-sized puzzle falling all in top of each other, and even thought she couldn’t see the whole picture, couldn’t figure out what laid ahead of her, she felt its weight on her shoulders. Better days where coming, if not for her, at least for her people. And that, their wellbeing and Bellamy’s return, was enough for her.

If she’d had it her way, Clarke would’ve stayed by Bellamy’s side until he was healed and could leave the hospital, but Jackson insisted that she needed to get some rest, since she had been up and alert for almost twenty-four hours. She only allowed it because Miller was the one to take her place by Bellamy’s side, and she knew he would take good care of their friend. So she left the hospital, picked Madi up from her friend's cabin, and then went home. It felt strange, coming home after her world had been shaken to the core, but it also felt good. Almost _right_. And for the first time in forever her dreams didn’t reminded her of the monster she had become, so many lifetimes ago.

“They have a camp some miles to the South,” Clarke told Madi as they got ready the following morning, since her daughter had requested a full, detailed report of Bellamy and Gaia’s adventure. “Bellamy said there’s a small lake and a waterfall near. They made wooden cabins and collected from the forest, and they hunted, too. He says it isn’t much, but I’m sure they managed to build something good for themselves.”

“You sound happier,” Madi commented, a grin on her lips as she brushed her tangled hair.

“Of course I am. I mean, they are alive, and they are here. Isn’t it…” Clarke sighed, unable to find the right words to express herself. “It isn’t everyday that your friends come back from the dead, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

Clarke eyed Madi in the half light of the morning. That grin remained on her lips, and it told Clarke far more things that Madi’s words could: she was happy, as well. She remembered how much Madi had relied on Gaia, once upon a time, and on Bellamy, once they could get past the Flame’s incident.

“Do you want to come with me today?” she asked. “We put a stop to our Council duties for a couple of days.”

Madi’s face lit up. “What about school?”

“Like I said, it isn’t everyday that your friends come back from the dead.”

Madi’s feet danced across the main street on their way to the hospital, and as soon as they reached Gaia’s room, which was the first on the hallway, she actually _squealed_ on excitement, a reaction that Clarke hadn’t seen in a long, long time.

Indra was already there —Clarke wasn’t sure she had ever left that room, in the first place—, and so were Jackson and Georgi, a concerned look on their faces as they examined the mother-to-be. The mood seemed to change as soon as Madi made herself seen, wary expressions shifting to warm smiles as the former Commander hugged her former mentor.

“You are so big, Madi,” Gaia said, holding the young _natblida_ close to her. Now that the initial surprise had passed, Clarke could see something new in Gaia’s manners and expression, a tenderness that hadn’t been there before. Maybe it came from her new gentle lover, maybe it came with maternity, like had happened to Clarke, or maybe it was a little of both.

“So are you,” Madi answered.

As they caught up on their months and years apart, Clarke approached the other doctos and Indra, joining the whispered conversation that was taking place near the door now.

“Is everything ok?” she asked on a low voice, although she already knew _something_ wasn’t right. It couldn’t be, given the expressions that once again occupied their faces.

“Yes and no,” Georgi said. “It’s not critical, but it isn’t… _good_.”

“You just said we shouldn’t worry about it!” Indra argued.

“And we shouldn’t.” Jackson raised both palms, trying to calm the warrior. He looked at Clarke for a moment before going back to Indra. “The baby seems to be backwards in the womb, with its feet down instead of the head. It isn’t something bad or to worry about, but the birth _might_ require surgery.”

“We’ve been delivering babies like that for years, without any of your fancy medicine,” Georgi snorted, as if they had been discussing the matter for some time now.

“And I’ve done a C-section before,” Jackson insisted, “but since we have enough time to send her to Bardo, where they are more prepared than us, why wouldn’t we?”

“I think it should be Gaia’s decision,” Clarke offered, trying to sound as neutral as she could. “It’s her baby and her delivery, after all.”

“She already decided,” Indra said, in a tone that evidenced she wasn’t happy with her daughter’s choice.

The honeymoon phase of the reunion didn't last as long as it merited, Clarke was sure of it, but she had learned to work with what was given to her, never expecting for the Universe to be kind with those who struggled. So when, during his afternoon’s check-up, Bellamy asked about Octavia for the second time, she knew it was only a matter of time before she lost him again.

While Murphy and Emori were currently leading at the North, Jordan living with them and Sanctum’s refugees, Octavia was living at the East, along with Echo and Gabriel. Raven had already updated Bellamy on their loses and their new friends, and had explained who Hope and Levitt were, so Clarke could go straight to telling him about Octavia’s recent history, all the changes she had gone though since his departure, how much better she seemed to be and how happy she and Levitt were together.

“I only hope she doesn’t die from the shock when she sees you,” Clarke commented, half joking, half serious.

“You didn’t send notice?” Bellamy asked, more curious than upset.

“We have an accord not to contact the other villages more than once a week,” she explained as she motioned for him to tilt his head upwards. She proceded to flash a light on his eyes to check his pupil’s reflexes. “The next boat leaves in two days, and I thought maybe you’d want to…” Her voice tinned as she concentrated on his left eye. “I guessed… since Gaia and Maximus are going there… did someone tell you?”

He nodded. “Max said they are thinking about going to live there.”

“Yeah.” Clarke busied herself with writing down his eye’s reflexes results on his medical chart. Then, she added: “Echo is over there, too.” She thought he already knew that, but she didn’t know what else to talk about.

“I was going to ask about her. How is she?”

Clarke ventured Bellamy’s eyes again, and found in them a guilt that moved her own. She _had_ to accept that he was going to leave. Of course he was. What did New Polis have to offer to him, while on Bardo awaited his sister and his girlfriend? The Universe was allowing her this precious time to catch up with him, and nothing more, nothing less.

“I haven’t seen her in a while, actually,” she admitted. “But I know she’s good friends with Octavia nowadays, and they’ve moved past their differences. Losing you is what got them closer, so we’ll have to see what happens now.” Bellamy laughed, which Clarke took as a good sign to continue with the subject: “She’ll be happy to see you are back.”

They remained in silence while she checked his hands’ strength. She asked him to hold hers as tightly as he could, and the nerves of both arms and hands seemed to be fine, working with the same efficiency. She wrote it down on the chart.

“How’s Madi?” Bellamy asked all of a sudden, as if the silence bothered him as much as it bothered her. “I thought I herd her voice earlier?”

“Yes, she is somewhere around the building.” Clarke felt a smile growing on her face, and Bellamy mimicked it. “She’s good, thank you for asking. She’s happy. And safe. And in her way to becoming a teenager, which honestly is pretty scary.”

Bellamy laughed so hard he started coughing, and Clarke was instantly on him with a stethoscope, checking on his lungs.

“I’m fine,” he assured her, gesturing for her to remove the cold instrument from his chest. “I just find it funny that your kid’s adolescence seems scary to you, given, I don’t know, _everything_.”

That brought another smile to her lips, easing the anxiety that his imminent departure had induced her. “Well, I’m doing this on my own, you know? It’s not like someone else can take my place if I mess her up.”

“You are not going to mess her up.”

Clarke shrugged, but added nothing. Wanting to change the subject to something less complex and, yes, _scary_ , she left the stethoscope on the table next to his headboard and piked up a small surgical hammer. She asked him to sit at the edge of the bed and tried both of his knees, humming in satisfaction when she noticed that they were working correctly.

“How am I doing, doc?” he asked after a while, and she could guess he was trying to lighten the mood.

“Pretty good.”

“Pretty good? And what could I do to be perfectly good?”

Clarke’s lips pressed into a line while she eyed him up and down. She shrugged again. “As soon as your wound is closed, you could try a bath.” Bellamy’s jaw fell to his chest, his face quickly gaining color. “I’m messing with you!” Clarke laughed, surprising herself with how easily she could make jokes around him. “You are fine. Just give your body a couple more days to heal, and then you are off to Bardo to see your girls.”

As Clarke helped him get back into bed, Bellamy mumbled something under his breath. She couldn’t catch his words, but then supposed maybe they weren’t for her to hear, since he didn’t push on the matter. He was fast asleep some minutes later, his body tired and still recovering from the trauma of the bullet and then the surgery, and she allowed herself to stay around for a little longer while she completed the last details on his chart.

Bellamy’s body was exceptionally healthy for someone who hadn’t had any medical attention in three years, but given _everything_ they had gone through on the last century, it wasn’t much of a surprise. They were survivors, after all, in body and soul and everything that came in between. She only hoped that her body and soul and everything could resist a little longer, maybe enough time to see Bellamy again, once he had settled on Bardo’s village. Maybe then they would have the chance to _talk_ about all those shadows that lingered on their eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!! Thank you for reading this far!
> 
> Sorry I couldn’t update sooner, I haven’t been super motivated lately. My hometown is strugglin' with ~the plague~ right now and that's not fun.  
> My original plan was to finish this fic before the last episodes aired, but I don’t think I’ll be able to do it. I hope the next episodes don't mess with my mind that much (we already know they will), and instead they'll motivate me to FIX this *^#& mess of a season in some way.
> 
> Before you proceed to hate on me in the comments: half of the things Clarke thinks are a product of her overthinking, don't believe *everything* she says.
> 
> Thank you again for reading. See ya soon! Xx Le Sirène


	6. Nothing stays the same

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that it is hard and we are angry and sad and disappointed, but please stay with me. A few days ago, before 7x13 came out, I wrote this fic's epilogue and I promise it’s going to be soft and loving and beautiful. I want to fix this mess. For all of us.
> 
> Highlight: “Was it wrong that she kept looking for peace even in peacetime?”

Monday afternoon, the main street was as crowded as it could get. Clarke’s eyes scanned the silhouettes standing in the front row of the assembled crowd: Madi and her friends, and older and younger kids, all smiling as widely as their chubby faces allowed. The youngest one couldn’t be more than six or seven years old, which made Clarke think that he’d must have been barely a baby when he went underground, and a child when he had to go across the desert to fight the battle for Eden. She couldn’t, and didn’t wanted to, imagine what that child’s life must’ve been, being raised in a place as dark as the Blodreina’s bunker. But there was no point on dwelling in that, she guessed, least that day of all days, when everyone was looking at each other with honest, toothy smiles.

It was time to inaugurate the school and the first handful of housing-units, which had been the most urgent things to finish, right after the hospital. There was only a dozen or so kids running around New Polis, but they deserved to get the best education and housing they could. They had been dragged from one dark hole to another ever since they were infants and little kids, and it was only right to give them the best their new world could offer.

The school was half the size of the hospital, but it was going to be modified and enlarged in the future, when they had the children to fill it with. For the time being it had three classrooms and a main hall that could fit four times their current number, so it’d me more than enough for the next few years.

The guided tour of the building fell on Clarke. As she showed the kids and their parents and guardians around, she unwittingly started to envision how the future would look there.

She pictured Madi studying in the classrooms, then enjoying recess with her friends, their laughter forever carved into the wooden arches that held the ceiling and their names carved in the toilet doors, as she had seen people do in movies. After Madi and her friends would come more children, children who had never heard about war, children free of their parent’s sins. Completely _innocent people_. They would learn about Earth between those walls, about the horrors the human race had endured so they could get there. They would learn about all the Apocalypses and the spaceships that fled worlds on fire, but they’d be free of the burden that came with survival.

She couldn’t help wondering if they’d ever hear _her name_ coming out of their teachers mouths. What would they think about her? Would any of those kids, or their children’s children, or their children’s children’s children find it in themselves to forgive her for all she had done? Or maybe redemption was not what she deserved, nor what she needed to survive. Maybe her destiny was to be forgotten, generations in the future, and that would be what, hopefully, would bring her the ultimate peace: to be left behind, her story of sorrow and destruction swiped under the rug.

It didn’t sound as sad as she thought it should. In fact, it sounded rather _peaceful_. Was it wrong that she kept looking for peace even in peacetime? Was it wrong that she secretly wanted to skip all of its pleasantries and go straight to _resting in peace_?

Clarke was brought back from her musings by a parent who had questions about the clases and the teachers, and she gladly explained them all they needed to know. Talking about maths and science was easier than talking about life and death and war and expiation, and she could only hope that, for the years that she still had ahead of her, all of her conversation topics would be as safe as that one.

Rest wouldn’t come that easily for her. With Indra at Bardo, Mor still out exploring, and Georgi more interested in the hospital than in the Council, Clarke had to take it upon herself to keep things working on the village. Thea was hardworking, but she was in charge of harvesting and food distribution, and didn’t know how to deal with people. And Nate, who was the head of security, was well disposed and backed up all of her ideas, but the truth was that, when Indra wasn’t around, the Council rested on Clarke’s shoulders alone. And there was _so much_ to do.

The day following the school’s opening, Clarke decided to start with the housing distribution, which was the next pressing matter.

Indra had already dealt with the list of names of who’d get which house-unit. The houses were actually little apartments with a living and dining area and two or three bedrooms, and they were distributed in groups of four, like tiny neighbourhoods, with a garden in common to which the houses front doors faced. They had built five units of four houses so far, so they had more than enough to accommodate the children with their parents or guardians, and then the nine pregnant couples that had wasted no time in the “populating the village” assignment.

Clarke read through the list, making sure all the kids’ names were actually there, and came to an abrupt halt when she came across her own name. “This can’t be right,” she muttered, and then looked at Nate, who was siting next to her at the Council’s tent. “Why is my name here? I’m not getting a house before everyone else.”

Nate gave her one of those sad smiles she had gotten used to receiving, starting so long ago that she couldn’t remember the first one. “The house is not for you,” he said. “You are the guardian of a kid, Clarke. The house is for Madi.”

“Madi’s ok with our cabin,” she insisted. “We can give the unit to one of the elders, or to a young couple that would like to start…”

“Don’t try to get away from this one.” Nate’s voice remained kind, but his tone evidenced that he had already gone through this conversation before, perhaps with Indra when she had first made the list. “Kids are getting the houses first. Madi is a kid. It’d be wrong if she didn’t take it.” Upon seeing her deep frown, he added: “No one will judge you, you know that, right? Besides, everybody loves Madi.”

Clarke contemplated all the ways in which she could argue against them getting the unit, but at the end limited herself to nodding in agreement, knowing that if Indra got back and they weren’t settled in their house, she’d most probably get an earful. She could let her pride aside for Madi, of course.

Like every other building in New Polis, their house was made of wood and stone. It had a small kitchen and living area, a dinning table, and two bedrooms with two actual beds each, with a shared bathroom in the middle. Clarke would’ve gladly invited any of their friends to move in with them, at least until the other houses were ready, but it was part of the rules that only the ones with children were to move in, so they could avoid people fighting over the living arrangements.

Clarke had to thank Indra for accommodating them in the same complex as Madi’s friends, because it would make life so much easier for all of them. Lila and her aunt lived right next door, and Georgi and Freya were across the garden. Madi thanked Clarke a hundred times for letting them move in, and assured her that she was the happiest girl on all of Earth II and the Universe beyond, which Clarke allowed herself to believe true.

As they moved their few possessions into their new place, Madi chatted nonstop about all the things they’d be able to do now that their house had more than one room, and how she’d like to decorate it with the tapestries the people on Sanctum were going to knit, and with the wildflowers she’d collect in her next walk in the meadows, just outside the village’s northern entrance.

“Lila said we can have more sleepovers now, because be have our own rooms!” Madi said as she unpacked her extra clothes in her bedroom’s little chest of drawers. “Could I host one, someday?”

“A sleepover?” Clarke asked. She was standing in the room’s doorway, content with simply watching as her daughter danced around their new space.

Madi fidgeted with the hem of a shirt while trying to hide her exited grin. “Yeah.”

“I guess you could.”

And then Madi looked at Clarke with that wide grin, eyes smiling, too, and Clarke felt herself becoming undone. She approached Madi with arms open, and Madi threw herself at Clarke. They hugged and laughed and kept chatting as they finished unpacking, and then proceeded to cook their first dinner at their new home, just as the sky started turning that deep shade of orange that Clarke hadn’t gotten completely used to.

It definitely was strange, having started the week thinking about a distant future in which she’d be forgotten, and right the next day moving into their brand new home. It turned out, the time-and-memory-rabbit-hole didn’t stopped at the distant future, and it took the near one in account, as well. As they cleaned up the dishes, Clarke started, once again, to picture life on Earth II from then on, and was glad to see that the near future seemed kinder than the distant one.

She could almost see Madi and her friends all over the place, hanging out at the dining table and having those infamous sleepovers in her bedroom, chatting in the kitchen and getting ready to go out once they were older. Clarke even dared to insert herself in those fantasies: she saw herself having long, quiet mornings of drawing by the windows, having breakfasts and lunches and dinners with Madi, getting ready to leave every morning and getting back to a warm house every night.

She wondered, not for the first nor the last time, about everyday life in the other communities. She had once thought about moving to Bardo, were she could be more or less anonymous amongst their numerous people, were she could have a normal life and not be in charge for once. She knew from Octavia’s letters that life over there was good, more relaxed than it had been on planet Bardo, and that the Disciples were accepting reality more and more each day. If it wasn’t for Madi, she might have moved there a long time ago.

Thinking about Octavia led Clarke to thinking about Bellamy, who had joined Gaia and Maximus on their one-way-trip. They hadn’t seen each other that much before he left, and she could only hope he’d come back to visit them in the nearest future possible. They still hadn’t had the chance to talk, long and honest and raw, as they could only talk to each other, and she felt in her bones the need to do so. She wanted to hear more about his time on the planet, about his adventures and misadventures, and she wanted to be able to vent about virtually _everything_. She wanted him back in her life, and it was selfish to think so, but she would’ve liked it _so much_ if he’d choose to settle on New Polis instead of Bardo. He had Octavia and Echo there, but maybe she could convince them to move across the Big Lake, once the houses where finished and New Polis’ foundations were stronger. More than anything, Clarke wanted to have her friends as close to her as possible.

That one was the most eventful week Clarke could remember since blasting open the Bunker. Thursday had just started when she found herself once again at New Polis' western entrance, greeting a group of travellers that, thanks goodness, had no wounded in their numbers.

Mor was a big, hairy man, and Clarke spotted him even before reaching the entrance. He seemed exited or agitated, she couldn’t tell, as he spoke to the guards, most of his men still walking towards the open gate.

“Ah! Clarke!” he greeted her, his tone far more cheerful than it had been before he left.

“I take it your trip was good?” she asked.

“It was good! Good!” he exclaimed in that rough accent that some of the Grounders had when they spoke in English. “You will not believe what we found!”

“Something more exciting than lost friends?” she ventured, feeling much more relaxed now that all the people under her care were back.

Mor kept smiling, a mischievous spark on his eyes. “Ah, yes, the friends. The friends were a surprise, but we found so much more!” He gestured to his men, who were gathering around them, and then pointed to one man in particular. She recognised him instantly: he had the Disciple’s markings on his face, and wore the same hand-made clothes is former companions had.

“You must be Doucette,” Clarke heard herself say, and the man nodded once, then twice. His face remained blank as he surveyed the village at her back. “They aren’t here,” she explained, reading his body language, the way in which his eyes were searching for familiar faces in the unfamiliar setting. “Bellamy and the others, they decided to go to Bardo.”

Doucette’s expression softened a little. He nodded again. It looked like he was about to speak when Mor reclaimed the group’s attention.

“They found animals!” Mor said, now gesturing to Doucette’s back, where two animals the size of donkeys stood in four legs each. They were curious creatures, with grey fur and sharp talons; they looked like something between a cat and a deer, with big wet eyes and a shot tail. “We can breed them, we can _eat_ them.” Clarke finally understood Mor’s enthusiasm: they had found a new food source, far better than the rodents, lizards and fish they had found so far.

“That’s… good,” she said. “How many did you bring with you? We’ll have to build pens to keep them.”

“Those things latter.” Mor gestured as if to put the topic aside. “We found so much more.” He made a dramatic pause, which almost had Clarke snorting; she had never seen a grown man acting in such a childish manner. But then he went on talking about their journey, about the extra miles they had explored after running into Bellamy and the others, about the small hill they had climbed and what they had found in the distance, like a glimmering golden vision. Within another week's travel of distance, they had seen the ocean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!! Thank you for reading this far!
> 
> I’m not even gonna bother talking about 7x13. I’m not even going to acknowledge s7 anymore. I read a tweet that said that MOVIES AND TV SHOWS BASED ON BOOKS ARE GLORIFIED FANFICTION, and I’m going to live by it from now on. In fact, I’m establishing my own canon: this fucking fanfic is my canon, from now on, and I made a series (you'll find it down here and up there, it's called All That Remains in the Universe) where I’ll write Bellarke being happy forever.
> 
> Not gonna lie: writing this was hard as fuck, mostly bc Belly-boy didn’t appear and more than anything I want to give him his happy ending now. But patience, my young padawans, he’ll be back, safe and sound, on the next update. As I said in the other note, I already wrote part of the ending, and it is SOFT and LOVING and EVERYTHING THEY DESERVE.
> 
> I send you all my love today <3 Le Sirène Xx


	7. I can't help but think of you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Highlight: “I think I’d like to have a lot of soulmates, one day… To have a lot of people who love me… A lot of homes.”

More than once, and more than twice, Clarke found herself wishing Indra hadn’t left. Even though Indra had become the head of the thing, the Local Council had always been about teamwork and balance, but lately it looked a lot more like Clarke handling everything and the others following her orders. It felt a lot like the Dropship days: expecting eyes looking at her, waiting for her to make the call, to make the decisions on her own.

Since the exact moment Mor came back, the village’s order had gone to hell. They had to stop building the houses so they could make pens to keep the new animals, and a barn where they could salt the meat for preservation. And then they had to send a second team to catch more animals, because only two weren’t enough to feed all of New Polis and the other villages, since they were on charge of the biggest part of food distribution. With Mor’s people being moved from one place to the other, their tasks always changing, a lot of people had to be relocated. The ones harvesting now had to prepare the land for the animals, and the ones fishing had to go hunting, as well. And then the people who were still waiting for their proper houses started complaining about the construction being halted.

It was a week of late nights and early mornings. Clark was thankful that they didn’t have many mirrors on Earth II, because she didn’t wanted to know how deep and dark the bags under her eyes were; feeling like she was about to pass out any second was enough.

The long nights, as dreadful as they were, gave her the chance to work in silence, which was one of the many difficult things to obtain in the village. During the day, the sounds of construction filled the air, and at dusk one could hear the friends and families gathering at the foodcourts to have dinner after a day of hard work. For that, she cherished her long, lonely nights.

The Council’s table was covered by Mor’s rudimentary new map, a composition of lines and doodles that had her inner artist begging her to redraw it. Clarke studied the map and compared it with the others they already had, trying to put together the bigger picture of the land. The Big Lake was drawn in one corner, and there was a red line that went to the mountains’ western side and circled them, signalling the team’s path. At about two or three days’ distance from New Polis, there was a drawing of a river, and then a little lake and a waterfall. Between the waterfall and the forest, which was the same one that surrounded New Polis, there were two words: _the camp_.

New Polis had meadows at the North, the forest to the South, plains to the West, and the Big Lake to the East. Mor’s map showed that the forest kept going on and on to the South, and so did the mountains, and at the end of the forest there was a handful of hills, where the red line stopped its journey, and then came more forest and then the sea. Under the word _ocean_ , between a parenthesis, a handwritten letter different to the one in the rest on the map had added the word “ _golden_ ”.

“What are you doing here?”

Clarke jumped on her seat. After eight months living in a safe place, her once sharp instincts had started to get lazy, and she couldn’t notice Nate approaching her until he was right in front of her.

“You scared me,” Clarke sighed, placing a hand on her chest, where she could feel her fast heartbeat through her clothes.

“Why are you still working?” Nate asked, brows furrowed. “It’s two in the morning. And it’s Friday.”

“I need to finish these, I want to make a larger map.” She noticed his guard uniform, the mud on his shoes, the gun at his side. “Were you patrolling?”

“My shift just ended.”

Nate went to the back of the tent, where they kept the metal trunk that held all the weapons in the village. It had been a decision to ensure the safety of everyone around: guns and weapons were only for the guards and the hunters. Even Clarke and Indra didn’t carry any kind of weapon, which she still had to get used to. For the longest time she had carried a gun, day and night and during war and during those uneasy times of peace they had once experimented, and not having one on her made her feel uneasy at times, but also extremely free. It would be more difficult to kill someone with her bare hands than it was with a gun.

She went back to work while Nate removed his uniform. She heard as he took off his jacket, unloaded his gun, placed it in the trunk and then turned the key. Next he went to the other side of the tent, where they kept the ammunition hidden under another trunk, and put away his gun’s magazine. Unable to concentrate now that her lonely night had been interrupted, she looked at him, only to find that he was already staring at her.

“So,” he said. “working hard.”

“Yeah.”

Nate wandered around a little longer before taking a seat across from her. He opened his mouth, as if he was about to speak, but then closed it. Then he said: “Did you see that Doucette guy? He’s kind of… odd. Very serious.”

“Everyone from Bardo is a little odd. They were born in labs.”

He nodded, his fingers drumming on the table.

“Are you ok?” she asked, accepting that she wasn’t going to get any more work done and putting the maps aside. “You seem off.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he exclaimed, but his voice came out strangled.

“You sure?”

“I guess… there _is_ something on my mind, but I don’t want to sound…”

Clarke forced a laugh, if only to calm his nerves. “Come on. What is it?”

He looked at her warily, his usually relaxed face darkened by the dim light and the late night. Clarke guessed it must had been a long week for all of them, not only for her. She was about to insist when he finally spoke:

“When Bellamy came back, I thought that he’d be… joining us. In the Council, I mean. I thought maybe he’d like to take my place.”

That took her by surprise. She shook her head slowly, and found a myriad of knots and sore spots on her neck, product of the hours of concentration.

“No one is leaving you out a job.”

“No! That’s what I was trying to say. I…” He looked puzzled for a moment, as he tried to gather his thoughts or find the right words to express them. “I wouldn’t mind if he stepped in. He’s got far more experience leading people than I do.” He smiled a little, still deep in thought. “I always imagined that if he had survived, he’d be leading us. And, well, he _did_ survive, so…” He let the words float in the air.

“I’m afraid it’d be a little difficult for him to lead us from Bardo.” She had meant to make a light comment, but it came out more disappointed-sounding than she could recover from. “I’m sure he’d like to join us, if he could!” she added anyway, trying her best to lighten the mood.

Nate’s shoulders dropped as he let out a sight. Clarke reminded herself of the friendship the two boys —men —had once had, or still had, and that Bellamy’s surprise return and premature departure should be as hard for him as it was for her.

“Yeah,” Nate said, “I think he would.”

Walking in the cold, empty streets was other of the things Clarke liked about her late nights. The village was quiet and dark, but it still held its charm. Her now-empty cabin had been only a few minutes away from the Council’s tent, but the new place was in the oposite side of the village. When she finally reached her doorstep, her nose and cheeks were red, wind-kissed.

As soon as she opened the door, she heard Madi’s voice coming from her bedroom. Not her own, brand new bedroom, but Clarke’s.

“Clarke? Is that you?”

“Yes, I’m home.” She removed her boots and jacket by the entrance, and then joined her daughter in the dark room. “I thought you’d be asleep by now. It’s very late.”

Madi was curled up in Clarke’s extra bed, which had been pushed next the other so they made a bigger one. “I was asleep,” she said. “You woke me up.”

“Sorry.” Clarke looked for Madi’s face in the darkness and found the sparkle of her big, brown eyes. “Go back to sleep, I’ll come back in a minute.”

She went to the bathroom, changed her clothes, and then went to bed. Madi was still half-awake, half-asleep, and asked Clarke about her work. She always asked about the Council, and Clarke couldn’t tell if it was out of interest or to be polite, or if it had to do with the time she had been a Commander. Clarke knew, probably better than anyone else in that planet, that leadership left a mark on one’s character. It wasn’t something you could walk away from just like that.

“You take it too seriously,” Madi decided once Clarke had told her all the things she had done that day.

“I’m working double.”

Madi shook her head. “I don’t think Indra does in a week what you do in a day. You’ve always been an over-thinker.”

Clarke laughed, moved by her daughter’s innocence. As far as she could tell, it didn’t matter how hard she worked, it wasn’t enough. It had never been enough, as her history showed so clearly. She had learnt long ago no to trust a victory, because they were easily corrupted by a new problem. Every time she dealt with a catastrophe, a new one came and wiped out all of her progress; it was a matter or _when_ , not _if_. So she couldn’t settle, she couldn’t rest, she had to be _alert_.

But instead of dwelling on that, she asked Madi about her day, in return, and Madi told her everything about the new school, about her teachers and her friends and all the boring stuff they were going to teach them.

“ _Why_ do I need to learn math? Math won’t help me grow food or catch a prey, it’s completely useless!”

“But it could be useful if you ever wanted to build a house or a machine.”

“If it requires so much math, then I won’t build anything,” Madi exclaimed, but her words came up blurry, sleep not quite leaving her.

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out. You’ve faced worse than maths and geometry.”

“Oh, don’t get me started in geometry.”

Clarke laughed again, and Madi echoed, and then silence took over the room. 

Clarke tried to cleanse her head from all the problems that remained unsolved, but sleep wouldn’t come that easily for her as it did to Madi. Or at least that’s what she thought, until Madi spoke again, voice lower and sleepier than before.

“Do you believe in soulmates?” Madi asked, startling her.

“Where does that come from?” Clarke inquired, turning towards Madi even though they couldn’t see each other.

“It’s something the girls were saying today.” Madi yawned. “Uma thinks Turner is her soulmate… She’s got a crush on him.” Her voice was thin and groggy, and Clarke had to make an effort to hear it. “It made me think of the stories you used to tell me… And I believe that you… you and Bellamy might…”

Clarke couldn’t believe what she was hearing, and neither could believe what she asked next: “Do you think we are… _soulmates_? Like Uma thinks Turner is hers?”

Madi shook her head. “Don’t know.” She sighed, as if talking required too much energy. “It doesn’t have to be romantic or anything… It’s about home… and family. Like, you and I… we could be soulmates, too.” Clarke heard the rustle of the sheets as Madi held them closer to her. “I think I’d like to have a lot of soulmates, one day… To have a lot of people who love me… A lot of homes.”

The aftermath of the long nights were harsh early mornings, which were becoming harder and harder as the days got colder and colder. But Saturday mornings were pretty important in New Polis, since it was when the boats came back from the other villages, bringing news, goods and products. Since the hospital’s inauguration, Jackson had requested for Bardo to send them more medicine, so they could have a larger stock, and for Eligious to send another metal table for the operation room, just in case. And, besides the profesional stuff, Clarke usually got mail from her friends on Saturdays.

Her past as a slayer and a dictator left behind in burning planets, Octavia was now calmer and more open than she had ever been, and they had finally crossed that little gap that had sometimes kept them in opposite sides of conflicts. They had bonded over losing Bellamy, but also thanks to Octavia’s time in Penance, or Skyring, like she called it, and her experience raising Hope. They were friends now, definitely good friends, with no weird power games weighing between them, and Clarke always looked forward her letters from across the Big Lake. She was sure thatthat week’s letter was going to be long and exciting, or maybe short and sweet, depending on how Bellamy’s return had affecter her.

Standing in the pier, the beach empty except for the fishermen and the pier’s workers, Clarke watched as the boat slowly appeared from behind the morning mist.

She saw him before he saw her.

Bellamy was sitting on the back row of the boat; his head was turned towards the mountains, their snowy peaks like claws against the golden sky. She knew it was a beautiful sight, the mountains were tall and broad and mysterious, but the sight in front of her was much more shocking, much more unbelievable. She hadn’t expected to see him again so soon, not at least for a couple of weeks or perhaps a moth or two, depending in how long it took for him to settle in Bardo.

But now he was back, out of the blue. It was as if all the talking about him from the previous day had invoked him back to New Polis.

Had something happened? Was everything all right? Maybe he had somehow gotten word from Doucette’s return and was coming to pick him up?

When the boat was nearing the shore, he finally noticed her, too. The smile that grew on his face was the brightest thing in the scene, not even the sun, slowly rising at the East, could compare. He had shaved his beard and someone had trimmed his curls, now falling neatly on his forehead instead of covering his eyes. He was wearing an arrangement of Bardonian and Grounder clothes, with a new white shirt under his now-clean fur jacket, and a pair of dark grey pants. When they reached the pier and Bellamy got off the boat, she noticed that he had new, shiny black boots, too. If she hadn't been so happy to see him, she might have had time to be a little jealous.

“Hey,” he said, opening his arms as soon as he reached her side.

She leaned into him without thinking about it twice. Without thinking about it _once_ , in fact. She had always leaned into him like it was a second nature, and was glad to discover that their time apart hadn’t messed up that instinct in particular.

Clarke broke the hug so she could take a better look at Bellamy’s face. It had been so long since she had seen him without a beard, years upon years, since before Praimfaya. His cheeks remained a little scarred from the exposition to the elements, but the cut on his lip was healing well, and his eyes looked less clouded, too, as if he had gotten the time to clear his head.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, because she couldn’t figure it out. What had made him come back so soon? Upon seeing his frown, she added: “I’m— It’s so good to see you! But you surprised me, I thought you were staying in Bardo, with O and Echo.”

He gave her a small smile she couldn’t quite read. “Change of plans.”

Clarke motioned for them to get off the pier, since the workers were struggling to unload the boat with them standing in the way. He descended the few steeps to the beach first, and then offered her a hand, as if it was his second nature, too, to be near her. His hand was strong and calloused and warm, just like she remembered it, and for some reason she missed it as soon as he dropped hers, once both her feet were on the sand.

Bellamy started walking towards the village, and she noticed something new hanging from his shoulder. It was a small grey pack, with Bardo’s phoenix embroidered in silver thread. An idea crossed her mind, so swift that she barely had time to register it before her mouth said out laud:

“Wait, so you are staying in New Polis? For good?”

Bellamy halted, the sound of his boots against the sand stopping with him. 

The early morning was so quiet, similar to the late night; only the sound of the lake’s waves against the shore remained. He turned towards her slowly, another indecipherable smile on his lips. She wondered how long would it take for her to be able to read him anew, for them to be in sync again, like once upon a time.

“Yes,” he said, “I’m staying for good.” And behind those words she found something that she hadn’t allowed herself to feel in the longest time: hope. And perhaps — _perhaps_ —a little happiness, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!! Thank you for reading this far!
> 
> It came to my attention that the last chapter’s note was kind of… angry, which, *yeah*, but I just wanted to add a more positive remark, after a weekend of reflexion: SEASON 7 IS NOT HOW OUR STORY ENDS. We all know that during the recording of the season the crew had a lot of personal stuff going on, and that the script was “changed last minute” and a lot of awful, unexpected things happened both in the show and in real life. Please remember that FICTION IS FICTION, and however the show ends ALL KINDS OF FICTION ARE VALID. As Kass Morgan herself said: “one storytelling medium doesn’t have the power to ‘ruin’ another”, and they don’t cancel each other, either. You can accept the show/books as the main canon, but please remember that what we do here and in other platforms is as valid as the “official” versions of the story.  
> As someone who has already been through the death of some of their favourite on-screen characters: I PROMISE EVERYTHING WILL BE ALLRIGHT <3 I know it doesn’t look that way right now, but I promise I promise I promise I promise it’s going to be ok.
> 
> Once more: FICTION IS FICTION, AND YOU CAN TAKE IT HOWEVER THE HELL YOU WANT!
> 
> I send you all my love <3 Le Sirène Xx
> 
> PS: expect to see A LOT of Mr. Bellamy Blake from now on ;)


	8. We’ll find a common ground

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Get ready for a long Bellarke conversation; they smile and laugh way too much but I just had to give them some happiness.  
> Highlight: “I’ve missed you so much, you have no idea.”

Clarke couldn’t remember the last time her cheeks had hurt that much. The smile remained on her face as she walked side by side with Bellamy across the main street, and then a little longer.

Since the boat had left Bardo’s pier before dawn, Bellamy hadn’t had a chance to eat any breakfast, and neither had she. So now they were going back to her house. To have breakfast. Like it was the most normal thing in the world. It hit her in the face like a ton of bricks: it _was_ the most normal thing in the world nowadays, she realised. How many times had she seen friends gather around the foodcourt’s tables, all chatting while they ate, and then remaining there, their conversations extending towards midmorning or even noon in the weekends?

When they reached her complex, Bellamy eyed it with raised eyebrows.

“We moved in a few days ago,” Clarke hurried to explain. “It’s because of Madi. Kids got the houses first. I didn’t wanted to, but the Council—”

“It’s great, Clarke!” He smiled again, as if he felt almost as pleased as she did on that foggy morning. “It’s amazing how well things are going, really. I’m… I’m so happy for you.”

Something warm awoke in her chest, something that had been asleep for the last century and a half, she thought, but couldn’t name it. It felt a lot like her father’s smile, or the way in which their flat, back at the Ark, smelled like on Sunday mornings. Like tea and sugar and her mother’s oils. Too much, way too much to comprehend, but it felt warm nevertheless.

Clarke opened her front door and found Madi already at the table, eating as she lazily eyed one of the few books on Earth II, probably for homework. Madi’s head turned at the sound of the door, and the excitement on her face matched exactly how Clarke felt.

“Bellamy!” Madi got up and threw herself at his arms, as if she had somehow inherited that trait from Clarke. “You came back!”

He held her tight. “It’s hard to keep me away for long,” he joked. “Your mom invited me over for breakfast.”

“Amazing.”

Minutes later, the three of them were sitting at the table, Madi’s book forgotten, the cold morning filled by a laughter that house hadn’t witnessed yet.

But despite Bellamy’s lively —and probably exaggerated— interpretation of Octavia’s reaction when she had seen him alive and well, Clarke could read in his body language that _something_ was off. That’s why she was so glad when Madi announced with a sad smile that she had made plans to meet her friends in a few minutes.

“But I can tell them I’m not coming,” Madi assured Bellamy. “I see them everyday at school.”

“There’s no need to cancel on them,” he said, shrugging. “Go enjoy your Saturday. I’ll be here everyday, as well.”

Madi’s eyebrows furrowed. “ _Here here_?”

He laughed. “Not _here_ , but I’ll be around.”

Clarke had been watching their interaction in silence. It was still a little strange for her to see them talk and laugh and be relaxed around the other, after so long imagining how it would be when they finally met. Clarke knew that Bellamy had been there for Madi when they thought her dead, back in Sanctum, but she had yet to see how fond of the other they truly were. It shouldn’t surprise her that much: Bellamy had always been good with kids, and Madi had grown up with stories of him.

“Ok, let’s do this,” Madi sentenced, standing up. “I’ll go with my friends, but you’ll come by sometime next week. I want to hear more about the rest of the planet.”

Clarke was about to reprehend Madi for being so pushy, Bellamy might already have other plans in mind, but he answered before she could:

“Deal.”

Madi hugged them goodbye before she left, another smile plastered across her rounded face. The echo of the door closing behind her remained in the air for a moment before Clarke stood up. She had decided to clean the table before getting serious, just in case Bellamy was hiding bad, very bad news, and was surprised when he got up, too, meaning to help her.

“Stay right where you are,” she said. “I haven’t forgotten that only last week you were half dead in the hospital.”

Bellamy looked at her with a little challenge in his eyes. “I wasn’t half dead.”

“You looked half dead to me. Stay there.”

She placed their dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, but decided against actually cleaning them when she saw how much her hands were shaking. Jackson had told her it was a side effect of peacetime: her body wasn’t used to being relaxed, so now it took every incident, big or small, as if it was a life-or-death situation. She hoped Bellamy’s news were less deadly and more ordinary, but it wouldn’t surprise her if he was about to tell her that Bardo was planing on going to war with Eligius over _whatever_.

“I’ve got a message from Indra,” he said suddenly, as if he, too, had been waiting for Madi to leave so they could talk. “She’s not coming back until Gaia gives birth.”

_Ok_. That wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t catastrophic, either. Clarke stretched her back before reclaiming her place next to him at the table.

“How is she? Did Bardo’s doctors find anything new?”

Bellamy shook his head. “She’s fine. I think Indra’s going soft.”

Clarke tried to laugh, but couldn’t manage more than a tiny, crooked smile. “I think I understand her. I would’ve gone with you if I could.”

His eyes widened a little as they scanned her face. She had almost forgotten how dark they were, big and deep and gentle, like everything about him. Bellamy had always been an inamovible force, even during the most desperate times. But as much as he had cleansed himself on the last week, an uneasiness remained, somewhere deep in him.

“Are you ok?” she asked at last. “You already told me you are, but I can tell something’s bothering you.”

Bellamy sighed, breaking eye contact and focusing on his hands instead. “I got some news in Bardo. Things I didn’t expected.”

“Like Octavia’s story about Hope and Diyosa?” she ventured.

“Like _a lot_ of stuff.” His hands rose to his hair, now, and he played with it before continuing: “I’m still very confused. But, basically, my little sister is _older_ than me now. And my girlfriend broke up with me and is dating my sister’s niece, who stabbed her the last time I saw them, and also is the daughter of the mass murderer who destroyed the last habitable place on Earth—”

“Wait, what?” she interrupted his ramble. ”Echo is with Hope? I had no idea.”

Bellamy nodded. “She told me it’s recent, but she wants to give it a go. They spent so much time together in Skyring…”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not that… I’m not jealous or anything. I’m glad they have their lives and are happy. I know I’ve been gone for a long time, even longer for them, but…” His eyes wandered around the room. “I don’t know. Everything is so weird. I wasn’t expecting to see any of you guys again, either, so I understand that you all have made your lives. But I just... I hope someday I can be a part of them.”

His eyes remained everywhere and nowhere, never going back to Clarke’s. She could see that he was hurting, even as he tried to disguise it. And she could relate to him in so many levels; it was exactly how she had felt after her six years alone with Madi. When they were reunited, everyone had their own lives, new friends and families where she didn’t quite fit. Clarke decided, right then and there, that she wasn’t going to let Bellamy suffer in the same way she had.

“You _are_ a part of my life,” she told him, schooling her voice to be strong and assertive.

He finally looked back at her, a slight colour on his freckled cheeks. “Thank you.”

“I mean it,” she insisted. “I never… moved on from you, or anything. I couldn’t…” When words failed her, Bellamy placed a hand on her shoulder.

“It’s ok, Clarke. I understand.”

“It’s not! It’s not ok!” She shook her head, then took the hand on her shoulder and held it between hers. “I missed you so much, you have no idea. A part of me died when Gabriel told us you were gone, so please don’t think, not even for a second, that you are not a huge part of my life, because you are. You have always been my best friend.”

Bellamy looked taken back from her outburst, not being used to her talking about her feelings openly. But one moment later he was pulling her close, and she felt, once again, how her broken pieces gathered around his warmth, if only to feel something. Hugging as they sat in different chairs wasn’t very practical, so the embrace didn’t lasted long. By the time they let go, Clarke felt renewed, so she didn’t mind that much.

Bellamy was back. _Back_. Back from the dead and back from Bardo and back in her life _for good_. She definitely felt renewed.

“So,” Bellamy said, trying to get the conversation going again. “We have this village, peace and progress, no wars to fight, no people to save. What do you do, everyday? What am I supposed to do now?”

She looked at him for a moment, her lip caught between her teeth to avoid another wide smile. She was pretty sure she had smiled more in that morning than she had during the last eight months. Or eight years, perhaps.

“Whatever the hell you want,” she said.

Bellamy gave her a curious look. “For real?”

“Yeah. You can hunt, or join the guard, or train to become a doctor or a mechanic. You could work the fields, if you’d like a quiet life. I think I’d do that, if I could.”

“Why don’t you? Why do you stay in the Council, if you don’t like it? Were you elected or something?”

Clarke’s lips pursed. _That_ was the million ration points question, wasn’t it? “Something like that. After Sheidheda, Indra took over Wonkru, and we followed her lead. When we arrived here, she came looking for me. I only agreed because we were supposed to be a whole team, but it’s been falling apart since she left.”

He eyed her carefully, and she could almost see the wheels turning inside his head. “Why don’t you recruit more people to help?”

“I wouldn’t know who to pick. I don’t know a lot of people, and most of them recent me, anyway.” She felt no shame admitting that, less to Bellamy, of all people.

“Why? Did something happen?”

She arched an eyebrow. “Besides _everything_ , you mean?”

“Come on! I doubt they _hate_ you. Maybe it’s them who don’t know how to approach you. Have you done anything other than working since you arrived?”

“Not really,” she said after a beat.

One of Bellamy’s hands landed heavily on her shoulder, but it was in an encouraging manner, now. “You’ve got to give them the chance to know you, and they’ll love you once they do, I’m sure of it,” he said, a mischievous grin coming to his lips. “I happened to kind of hate you, back when we first met.”

Clarke pushed his hand aside. “Well, I kind of hated you, too.”

“And look at us now!” he exclaimed, earning another few giggles from her. “But, I’m serious, why don’t you quit?”

“I’ve thought about it hundredths of times,” she admitted, “but the truth is that I don’t know anything other than leading. I could give a hand at the hospital, but I know that as soon as the Council made a decision I don’t agree with, I’ll be back at their door complaining.”

“Ah, so we have a control freak!” he joked and she rolled her eyes, because both of them knew that was far from being true.

"Maybe someday, when everything is more settled, I’ll be able to walk away,” she said, her gaze settling on the open window by the front door. “If it wasn’t for Madi, I think I’d pull an after-Mount-Weather and go live in the woods for a while.”

Bellamy nodded ceremoniously. “Sounds good. One suggestion, though.”

She looked back at him. “Yes?”

“I’m coming with you, next time.”

Clarke studied his face, the determination that overpowered all his other emotions, and found traces of the boy he had once been, the very same boy she had abandoned in Arkadia’s entrance when the weight and the shame had been too heavy for her young and inexperienced shoulders.

“Is that a suggestion, or an affirmation?” she asked.

“An affirmation. I’m coming with you.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon together.

Clarke showed Bellamy around the village, pointed at the finished buildings and the unfinished ones, told him about all their plans for the trading posts and the little shops they were going to install on the main street, once the provisional tents and cabins were taken down. They still had a long, very long way to go, but someday the village was going to look more like a small city than a settlement, something like what the old Earth movies showed, with green parks and grey buildings and all kinds of activities. Someday.

For the time being, they had the tents and the cabins, the school and the hospital, the foodcourts and a single trading post, and the few residential complexes.

“I would invite you to stay with us,” she told Bellamy when he asked where he could settle, “but I’m afraid it’s kind of against the rules. I’m sure it would be fine for a couple of days, though.”

Bellamy shook his head gently. “I wouldn’t want to cause you any trouble. Put me wherever you think is best.”

Clarke thought about it for a moment. The logical thing would be to bring his case to the Council, where they would see which cabins were empty for him to take. But then she realised that _she_ was, essentially, the Council, so the choice would fall on her hands anyway.

“I could give you our old place,” she offered. “It isn’t very big, but it’s… nice, I guess. And it’s right in the middle of the village, so you are close to the foodcourts and that.”

“That’s good,” Bellamy said.

And so it was settled. He moved in right away.

Seeing Bellamy in the place she had shared with her daughter for so many months was a little strange, Clarke couldn’t deny it. It wrought up funny ideas to her head, made her imagine what could’ve been if he hadn’t gone missing, if he had been right next to her along the whole journey. Maybe he would’ve made things a little easier, maybe she would’ve had the support she had craved for so long.

But, once again: there was no point in dwelling in the past. They had _this_ and they had it _now_ : their unbreakable friendship, a bond that could endure death and tragedy and still remain strong, no matter what. And it was _way_ more than enough for her.

If Clarke had thought that Bellamy looked happy during the day, by nightfall he was _ecstatic_. Raven, Nate and Jackson joined them for dinner, and so did Doucette, who seemed a little less odd at the mild light of the fire. The foodcourts were arranged around crackling pits that kept everybody warm during the meals and lit their faces with a red and orange and golden glow, like tiny individual sunsets.

“The pair of you must stop dying and coming back to life,” Raven said at the middle of the meal, pointing at Bellamy and Clarke with her fork. “You’ll give me a heart attack one of this days.”

Bellamy brushed the comment aside with a burst of laughter, while Clarke could only shake her head and roll her eyes.

“What do you mean?” Doucette asked. He had been asking all kinds of questions since he arrived. It was only logical, of course: the poor man had appeared in the middle of a village of savages and warriors who knew each other since way back, while he was some kind of religious-pacifist who had never had to ensure a life of survival.

“Don’t tell me Bellamy hasn’t told you the stories!” Nate said, and then proceeded to recite the infamous stories about their deaths and rebirths and all the misadventures in between.

Doucette payed attention to Nate as he spoke, Raven interrupting him more often than not with her own input and comments on the past events. As they were going over the time Roan had kidnaped her, Clarke felt Bellamy’s hand brushing hers under the table, and turned to face him. His features were darkened by the dim light, while his brown eyes glowed, looking almost golden with the fire reflecting on them.

“Promise me one thing,” he whispered, only for her to hear.

“Anything,” she whispered back, because, _yeah_ , she’d do pretty much anything for him.

His brows furrowed further, his hand slowly climbing on top of hers until it was covering it completely. “Promise me none of us is dying on the other. Never again.”

Clarke held his strong stare, meeting him halfway. She nodded once, and he did the same. He let go of her hand then, going back to the conversation in time to argue that _no, Miller, he had_ not _been a total wreck after Mount Weather_ , but his warmth remained on her skin for the rest of the night, as his warmth used to do, if she remembered correctly.

For the second time that day —which had been a pretty long day, if she was being honest—, Clarke allowed herself to be hopeful for the future. Bellamy was back. Their friends were fine. Madi was happy. And she hadn’t worried about the village’s wellbeing and progress in more than twelve hours, which was a miracle all in itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!! Thank you for reading this far!
> 
> And thank you for staying during the world-building part of the story; now begins the rest of it, Bellarke in the same village, them working together, and the other adventures ;)  
> Honestly, I don’t know how long this is going to be. At the beginning I only wanted to reunite them and give them a happy ending, and that was that. But now I feel like I have to? keep going? Idk. It’s not a pressure or anything, but I feel like I could explore so much more, so I’ll keep going. I hope most you all can stay with me until the end <3
> 
> See ya soon! Le Sirène Xx


	9. The shadows are heavy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Highlight: “I was in need of a second, and he was in need of something to do other than sitting on his ass all day.”

Since the first time her feet had touched to ground, so many centuries ago, Clarke had never taken a weekend off, and now she could see very clearly _why_. As soon as she entered the Council’s tent, Monday morning grabbed her by the throat. Casually laying on top of the table, as if it wasn’t a big deal, she found a letter from Eligius that had arrived on Saturday’s boat. It was addressed to Indra, but also to the Council in general, so Clarke took the liberty of opening it, and read it at least two times before taking a moment to breathe.

In some mysterious way she couldn’t figure out, Eligius had gotten word about the animals New Polis was going to breed, and was demanding to get larger portions of meat than the other villages, since they were the ones who spent day in and day out carving the mountainside. “Bardo’s a bunch of lab-rats and Sanctum’s a bunch of hippies”, read the letter, and although Clarke wasn’t exactly sure _what_ was a “hippie”, she guessed it couldn’t be a very friendly adjective, given the letter’s overall tone.

So now there was a new problem to deal with. She had to figure out _how_ had Eligius gotten word of the animals so quickly, and then she had to contact their leaders and explain that there wasn’t going to be any new meat for a while, and on top of it she had to discover _what on Earth II was a hippie_.

But most of all she had to yell at herself. If she had done her job right, she’d found the letter sooner, maybe had gotten the chance to answer it before the boat left again. But Bellamy had distracter her on Saturday, and Madi had wanted to go on a walk though the woods on Sunday, and now it was Monday and she was already behind and it was her fault.

Mor walked into the tent with a smug expression on his face, that self-assured smile that hadn’t left his chapped lips since he came back with Doucette and his animals. “Morning,” he said, his deep voice tinted with amusement. “Why the long face, Clarke dear?”

She practically shoved the letter at his face, her hands shaking with piled-up stress.

Mor took his time to read it, his eyes travelling from one margin to the other so slowly Clarke was sure he was doing it on purpose. By the time he finished reading, Thea and Georgi had joined them, too, both taking their usual places in the oposite side of the table.

“Well?” Clarke asked Mor, one eyebrow raised.

“Meat won’t be available for a couple months.”

“ _I know_.” Clarke let herself fall heavily on her seat — _Indra’s_ seat— at the head of the table. “But how did they found out about the animals? We haven’t send word yet, somebody tipped them off!”

It was Mor’s turn to raise one bushy eyebrow. “One of the men we send back with your boy was Eligius,” he explained, matter-of-factly. “He must’ve told his chiefs.”

Clarke felt her cheeks warming up.

“Oh,” she murmured, refusing to let him see that her own head had gotten the best of her for a moment. Of course there was going to be a logical explanation that didn’t involve spies and conspiracies and their peace treaties crumbling to the ground. “That explains it, then.”

“It does.”

Instad of addressing Mor’s mocking tone, Clarke proceded to open her notebook and started reading through the day’s to-do list out loud.

“Georgi,” she called, addressing the healer. “The days are getting colder and shorter, so we must assume people will start getting sick soon, at least with the flu. What do you recommend?”

Georgi stirred in her seat. “We should ask Bardo about the medicinal plants they were testing.”

“Ok.” Clarke wrote that down, but was interrupted by a quiet huffing. “Something you’d like to share, Thea?”

Thea was an imposing woman, and that was to say a lot, considering the amount of imposing women Clarke had known along her years in space and in different plants. She had mahogany hair, her skin was always tan and wrinkled because of her work on the fields, and her hands were strong as a warrior’s but delicate as a healer’s.

Her dark eyes surveyed the room before landing on Georgi. Clarke had always assumed they were friends, or at least friendly with each other, but now she had her doubts. Thea was looking at Georgi with an annoyance Clarke was more than glad had never been directed towards her, but had seen more than once be directed towards Mor’s derisive comments.

“I’ve been studying the plants, too, you know? That’s my _job,_ ” Thea stated.

If she was disrupted by the sharp tone, Georgi didn’t showed it. “But Bardo’s got better technology. I’d rather rely on their studies, at least for now. I don’t want to risk killing half or population on our first year here.”

“The plants are safe.” Thea’s hands rested on top of the table, closed in tight fists. “Only _one_ of my people got sick.”

“But we had to send them to Bardo! They almost died!”

Something hit Clarke on the shin, and she realised it had been Mor’s foot. She looked at him with a stare she could only hope held a quarter of Thea’s attitude, but he smiled to her in return.

“Should we stop them before they cut each other?” he asked.

It took Clarke a full second to steady herself. She had been so surprised by and then focused on the fight, she had forgotten it was her job to keep the Council in line.

“Why don’t we all take a minute to calm down, please?” she asked, schooling her voice not to falter. She was more than aware that she was at least a decade and a half younger than all of them, but her words somehow mitigated the bickering, and they looked at her as if they respected her, or perhaps respected the memory the person she had once been. “I’m sure you are right about the plants, Thea, but why don’t we cooperate with Bardo, instead of fighting them? We are meant to be working together, that’s the whole deal.”

Thea looked like she was about to leap forward and bite Georgi’s head off, and maybe Clarke’s, too. But at the end she squared her shoulders, her gaze falling to the table, and said: “I’ll send a letter to their healers on the next boat. We can compare notes.”

“ _Awesome_ ,” Clarke said under her breath, to which Mor smiled again.

“Great!” he exclaimed, clapping on the air as if to settle the issue for once. “Now let’s go back to the animals!”

Just as Clarke was about to bring up the need of contacting the other two villages in regards of the new food source, so everyone was in the same page, Bellamy entered the Council’s tent.

Nate was the one to enter the tent, actually, Bellamy following his step closely, but Bellamy was all Clarke could focus on. He was wearing a black and grey guard vest, his face serious and concealed. It reminded her so much of another time, another life, when he had defended a different kind of settlement. All that was missing from her memories were his riffle and the Ark’s debris scattered around them. And about a century, give of take.

“Good morning, ladies,” Nate said, bowing his head at Georgi and Thea. “Mor.” Now he bowed to the man. “And Clarke!” To her, he gave a smile.

Only then Bellamy noticed her, it seemed. He smiled broadly when their eyes met, small wrinkles gathering around his’.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she answered. “What brings you here?”

Nate started to make his way across the tent while Bellamy stayed by the door, his feet glued to his place and shoulders squared, as if trying to stand his ground against some invisible enemy.

“Bellamy’s joining the guard,” Nate explained, opening the trunk that held the weapons. “I was in need of a second, and he was in need of something to do other than sitting on his ass all day.”

“ _Ouch_ ,” Bellamy complained, but a small laughter travelled across the tent. Clarke watched in shock, actual shock, as a smile creeped into Thea’s solemn face. “I spent the last three years living in the wilderness while you had hot water and a roof,” he continued as Nate went through the trunk.

“Ah, that’s _nothing_!” Mor intervened, still laughing. “I survived on my own in Azgueda territory during winter. For four months!”

All the heads in the room, including Nate’s, who’s hands were still buried in the weapons, turned to the man.

“You win,” Bellamy said, and another burst of laughter, louder this time, grew.

It only then occurred to Clarke —only then, after almost two weeks since his return—, that Bellamy had been living in Earth II for three years. _Three whole years_.

“Oh my God,” she said, and now the heads turned to her, but she was focused on him. “You know about winter!”

Bellamy’s brows furrowed. “Yeah?”

“The seasons,” Clarke tried to explain, gesturing towards Thea, who looked at her with the same confusion. “We haven’t figured out how they work, but you’ve been here longer!”

Thea’s face was lightened by understanding, at last. “That’s right! We need to know for the crops.”

“We need to know for _everything_ ,” Clarke exclaimed, getting to her feet. She turned to Nate, who had found the guns he wanted and was standing next to the now-closed trunk. “I know it’s his first day, but can we borrow Bellamy for an hour or two?”

Nate looked at her as if he was about to yell at her, but at the end he nodded, and she understood that he had been repressing a smile instead. “He’s all yours,” he said, and then turned to Bellamy. “But you’ll make extra hours later.”

“Come on!” Bellamy exclaimed. “It’s not my fault that the boss needs me.”

“She’s not your boss.” Nate snorted, pointing at him with an accusatory finger. “ _I am your boss_ , and you better not forget that.”

Bellamy remained in the sidelines until the Council’s daily meeting was over, and at midmorning Nate went to organice his guards, Mor went to supervise the building of the pens, and Georgi said something about the hospital, to where she ran every chance she got. That left Clarke, Bellamy and Thea alone in the tent.

Bellamy walked them through their new world’s climate and seasons, which turned out to be not that much different to Earth’s.

“Autumn is the longest season,” he explained. “It lasts about six or seven months. We are in autumn right now, in fact. I guess it was starting when you got here.”

“Yes, it was warmer at the beginning,” Thea said, and then scribbled something on her notebook. “But the plants grow, even in autumn,” she added, and it sounded like a question.

Bellamy considered it for a moment. “The ground is very rich, pretty much anything grows easily around here. But…” he shrugged. “I don’t know a lot of plants, honestly. You should talk to Max sometime, he’s such a nerd.” A small smile grew on his lips, but it only lasted a second and then he went back to business: “The winter is very short, around three months, maybe less, maybe more, and it doesn’t get very cold.”

“That’s good.” Thea continued writing down his instructions. “We won’t freeze to death and some of the crops won’t die, hopefully. What about the spring and summer?”

Clarke found herself holding her breath. Earth II’s perpetual autumn was beautiful, with the red and the golden and the chilly breeze, but she longed for greenery and the warmth of the sun and the long days.

“It’ssimilar to the winter and the autumn,” Bellamy said. “Summer’s short and not that hot, but it’s nice. And the spring’s so long it makes you forget winter even exists.” His eyes landed on Clarke’s, and she could see in them the same longing for warmth that she felt.

“It’s twenty months a year, then?” she asked.

Bellamy’s brows hid behind his untamed curls. “God, it _is_! I hadn’t even realised.”

Clarke couldn’t contain her laughter. “No human ever had a twenty-month year. That’s gonna require lots of organising.”

He matched her grin. “I guess it will.”

Clarke shivered, silent drops from her wet hair soaking her shirt and making her neck and back grow cold. The house was warm, though, and she knew she’d be alright once her hair dried, but for now she shivered as she braided her daughter’s hair.

It had been a hard couple days, between the Council and the people who had in fact started to get sick as the temperature dropped quietly. Madi had asked Clarke to clear her schedule that night, so they could actually spend time together. After so many years on their own, it was still hard for Madi to be surrounded by people all the time. She still _talked_ about other people when they were alone, though. Clarke couldn’t blame her for that; she finally had friends and acquaintances and places to go and things to do and teachers to complain about.

“Miss Willa is _so annoying_ ,” Madi told Clarke as they were sitting on her bed. “She made me change seats because Lila was laughing. Why would she make _me_ move, when I wasn’t the one laughing? It was Uma’s fault, she was staring at Turner from the other side of the room and I swear she was _drooling_.”

Clarke hummed as she tied the ends of the braid with a thin piece of leather.

“She says Turner is going to fall in love with her before winter’s over.” Madi shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t know what she’s planning, but it can’t be good. Her _nomon_ was a potion maker, did you know? She says she was a healer, but Grounder medicine is so barbaric—”

“ _We_ are Grounders, Madi,” Clarke laughed, shifting on her place so they were facing each other.

“I know, but I mean from _before_.”

That was one thing Madi used to do: separate the time before and after Skaikru landed on Earth with the world _before_ , as if it had been some kind of important event on her life, even though she was far too young to remember.

“Their medicine was completely normal, only a little old fashioned” Clarke insisted. “I’m sure her confidence comes from hope and innocence.”

“There’s nothing innocent in my friends, Clarke. They were raised on the Bunker, they are a bunch of _menaces_.”

Despite all the darkness that statement could hold, Clarke found herself laughing harder. Madi had a way of brightening everything up, even in the middle of a cold night. Her eyes were shining as she watched Clarke laugh, a smile coming to her pink lips.

“I mean it!” she insisted, but her words held no real weight. “One more yeardown there and they would’ve come out unfixable.”

It wasn’t long before they said goodnight and Clarke made her way to her own bedroom, the tension of an amused smirk lingering on her cheeks. Her hair had dried at last and her shirt was barely damp, but she changed it anyway, absurdly happy with the fact that she had the luxury of owning two extra shirts. Then, she got under the covers and was glad to receive their warmth.

She went over her day on her head, checking that she had done everything on her mental list and put things in order for the following day. The long nights and early mornings had followed her through the week, the weekend of rest long forgotten, and although her body was extremely exhausted, overthinking was a regular part of her daily routine.

She had spoken to Niylah about the trading post, and she had joined Mor on his visit to the pens, which were almost finished. And that was _good_ , because they had to keep building the houses before people started to complain _again_ , and they had yet to finish Raven’s lab, and they had to keep going. To keep building. To keep planing. To keep designing their future.

_The future_. That was a place she didn’t wanted to go to, right now. The future was far away and scary, it was something she couldn’t quite control, despite her best efforts to plan and see ahead. The present was ungovernable enough on its own, things always changing, problems always popping in when she least expected.

_Calm down_ , Clarke commanded herself. _Breathe_. It was also a part of her routine to remind herself that she had to learn to live with the surprises, with the unexpected. They were at peace. Any problem they would face, from now on, would be small, _minuscule_ , in comparison with their pasts. And, besides, not all of the surprises were bad.

Bellamy’s return had been unexpected, to say the least, and it had made her so _happy_ she still couldn’t comprehend it. They were seeing each other almost daily, even if it was a quick _hello_ as they passed by the other on the Council’s tent, and they had had dinner together on Monday to celebrate that he was joining the guard. She was probably going to see him the following day, because he had the morning shift at the Council’s front door, and maybe she could manage to scape her duties at least for a couple of minutes to go chat with him.

Tomorrow didn’t sounded half as bad when it held the promise of Bellamy’s early morning face, the cold air making his cheeks blush and the breeze playing with his curls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!! Thank you for reading this far!
> 
> Mor is so annoying, I love him.  
> On regards of the Bellarke content, I wanted to say that IT WILL COME… eventually. Like, please have a little patience with me. I know *where* we are going with all of this everyday life and village and work stuff I swear. And... the next chapter... might contain some... other stuff...?
> 
> See ya! Xx Le Sirène
> 
> PS: Thank you for your lovely comments on last week's chapter. It was my birthday on the day I posted and you guys made me feel so happy :)


	10. I don’t want to rest in peace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Highlight: “Someone needs to get her to take a break.”

Clarke managed enough self control to only at tug her curls slightly, when she actually felt like tearing them all out of her skull.

“Mor, you are _not_ helping,” she mumbled under her breath.

Her precious morning, the morning she had all planed out, had been disrupted pretty early on the day, when Mor and Raven had bursted through the tent’s door, arguing so loudly that the people on Bardo must’ve been able to hear them, all the way across the Big Lake.

“I _know_ you have to build houses,” Raven was saying, “but any brute can build a wall. I need competent workers to build sophisticated machines!”

Mor had looked like he had received a slap across the face, but recovered quickly enough. “Machines are not our responsibility. We shot things and grow things and build things! That is our way.” 

“That might be _your_ way, but I’m a freaking engineer. I _create things_ , and I need extra hands to create even bigger, better things.”

The rest of Clarke’s morning was consumed by an endless attempt at trying to reason with the two most stubborn people she knew.

Raven had a strong defence for her demands: she had accepted to delay the construction of her lab so they could finish the first house-complexes, and for that Clarke was thankful. But Mor’s men and women were loyal to him, and wouldn’t help Raven without his blessing, which Mor absolutely refused to give. Raven was requesting his right-hand woman and one of his strongest men, who Clarke knew to be the ones who did the most of the work, but also were one the smartest people around. It made sense that she wanted them on her team, but Mor was also right when he said that he couldn’t let them go just like that.

So it was a mess. As usual. And Clarke had to deal with it on her own. As usual.

Two hours had gone by since they had bursted through the door, and now the three of them were sitting at the Council’s table, Raven and Mor refusing to even look at each other.

“Why don’t you ask if Bardo can send someone to help?” Clarke suggested.

Raven snorted. “I don’t need stupid scientists telling me what to do. I need workforce.”

“I’m sure there’s workforce on Bardo, too.”

Raven crossed her arms and sank deeper on her seat, her mouth pouted as she appeared to consider the suggestion. “Fine,” she agreed after what seemed like forever. “But if they turn out to be useless I’ll have one of Mor’s people.”

“No,” the man refused. “If they are useless, then you’ll have to train them.”

Raven’s fists hit the table with a loud thud. “You are _so annoying_.”

It took another twenty minutes for them to reach some sort of agreement. The final resolution wasn’t ideal, but Clarke knew that there was absolutely no way for the both of them to be completely satisfied. And she was completely exhausted, to be honest, so she took her small victory as it was and called it a day.

As Raven was picking up the blueprints for her next few projects, the very ones that required more handwork in order to get completed, she told Clarke: “Why don’t you come by the lab later? I want to show you something.”

“Will I be going as acting head of the Council or as a friend?” Clarke asked, not quite ready for another hour of debate.

The edges of Raven’s lips curled upwards. “As a friend.”

“Then I’ll be there around nightfall, when I’m done here.”

The mechanic left without further ado.

Mor had left as soon as they had agreed on Raven _not_ stealing one of his men or women during the night, so Clarke found herself alone on the Council’s tent for the first time that day. She had neglected her other duties in order to take care of Raven and Mor’s conflict, so now she had a ton of work to do before joining her friend.

Clarke and Raven’s relationship had never before been as smooth as it was nowadays. There had always been something standing in the way of their friendship, and it had taken them yet another End of the World to finally reach their own form of peace. They were better now that they had gotten the chance to talk about their differences and similarities and worldviews, and about everything that had gone wrong along the decades. Or years. Or months. Or whatever. Clarke felt far too old to still be in her early twenties.

The thing was: it was good to have a friend around. After Praimfaya, after the battle for Eden, after everything that had happened in Sanctum and Bardo, it was good to have someone to talk to, or not talk and just hang out with, even if that friend was a ticking bomb like Raven. The mechanic was almost as stressed as Clarke herself, always running against some invisible ticking clock, an unspoken race against Bardo’s scientists. But a friend was a friend, and taking into account the small number of humans alive, Clarke couldn’t be too picky, even if hanging out with her always meant giving a hand at the lab.

The crepuscular air was cold but gentle, like a whisper on her exposed skin. Clarke tried to shield her neck with the collar of her jacket, but it didn’t offer much shelter. The walk helped her gain some heat, though, at least enough so she wasn’t shivering when she reached her destination.

“Hello,” she said as she entered the lab, which was still a work in progress. It had a roof and four walls, but the interior still looked sloppy at best, and about to crumble to the ground at worst.

“Over here!”

Clarke followed the voice to the back of the big, open room, where Raven was sitting on the floor, surrounded by wires and bulky tweezers and some kind of old, rusty machine. She sat by her side, knowing that it was only a matter of time before Raven requested her to hold or hand her something as she worked.

“That was an interesting morning, huh?”

Raven huffed. “I’d like to volunteer Mor to get floated as soon as I build a rocket.”

“That may take some years, don’t you think?”

“Space did wonders to my patience, Griffin. You’d be surprised.”

Clarke laughed. It had taken some time for her to be confortable with Spacekru talking about space so naturally, but now she could talk and laugh about it with them. For the longest time, she had felt excluded from tose conversations, from that long period of years in which they had grown together while growing apart from her. But those years on the Ground had made wonders to her patience, too.

“What are you working on?”

Raven’s white teeth flashed behind her lips as she smirked. “I’m building a radio system.”

“Oh. That’s ambitious.”

“Dam right it is. We talked about connecting the villages this way a few months ago, on the last General meeting. I want to beat Bardo’s ass at it, show them who’s got it bigger.” Clarke snorted and Raven added: “Who’s got the bigger _brain_. Dear God, who would’ve thought you had such a dirty mind behind your goldilocks facade.”

“You are the one who talks with double meanings!”

“But you are the one who chooses the dirty one from the two!”

Clarke elbowed Raven on the ribs, and she let out a scandalous laughter. 

They were far away form their morning altercation now, comfortable with chatting leisurely as Raven worked on what one day would be a radio, hopefully. Clarke couldn’t envision _how_ would she transform that pile of junk into something useful, but she knew better than underestimating the brain that had gotten them so far in life.

“I’ve been thinking about chopping it off,” she commented after a while.

Raven eyed her sideways as she tied some wires together. “Chop what off, now?”

One of Clarke’s hands traveled to her hair. She grabbed one blonde curl and twisted it between her fingers, trying not to overthink how much that reminded her of someone else. “The goldilocks,” she explained. “I didn’t noticed when it started to grow, and now it’s kinda long and kinda annoying.”

Raven put her tools on the ground. She had a strange look on her face, as if some distant memory was playing before her eyes, her mind in worlds far away as her lips drew a nostalgic smile.

“Leave it long,” she said, her voice softer than Clarke had ever heard. “It… It reminds me of when we first got to the Ground. When we were still innocent.”

Clarke’s mouth went a little dry, all of a sudden. “We were never innocent.”

Raven’s sad smile remained. “I know. But we still had hope, back then. And now that we are actually at peace…” She sighed deeply. “It reminds me that we truly made it. That the scared kids born in space actually made it to the Ground and survived it.”

A heavy silence grew in the lab.

It wasn’t unusual for their conversations to end up turning out that way. Their past was far too heavy, heavier than any sound or actual weight, and it always found a way to slip into conversations, the same way in which the cold breeze from outside slipped in through the lab’s glassless windows.

The uneasiness didn’t last for long, though, as a figure appeared at the front door, carrying a box full of materials.

“Raven? You here?”

Her leg’s brace creaked as the mechanic stood up in one rushed movement, as if trying to take their conversation off from her shoulders. “I’m here.”

When the figure entered the lab and reached Raven’s lonely lamp, Clarke’s shoulder’s relaxed, as well. The one carrying the box wasn’t other than Bellamy, the only human alive capable of lightening her heavy pack.

“Hey,” he said as he, too, noticed her. “They told me you had gone home already.”

“Raven wanted to show me this,” she answered, pointing to the bundle or wires and tools. Something on his words stuck to her, and she asked: “What time is it?”

“Quarter to seven,” Raven said as she started to go through the box’s contents, not even waiting for Bellamy to place it on the ground. “Why? Did you have plans?”

Clarke decided to ignore the suggestion in her tone as she stood up and dusted off her pants. “I have to finish the day’s reports,” she said instead. “Thea was going to bring me updates on the crops, and I should take a look at that before calling it a day.” 

She started to make her way across to lab and towards the door. The look the other two exchanged didn’t go unnoticed by her, but she had long ago given up on trying to read Spacekru’s silent conversations, so she kept going, and only stopped on the threshold for a moment.

“I’m sure you’ll kick Bardo’s ass,” she told Raven, and then looked at Bellamy. “See you tomorrow.”

The breeze carried Raven’s muted words to Clarke’s ears as she was exiting the lab. “Someone needs to get her to take a break.”

Clarke snorted, then said out loud: “I can still hear you, you know?”

A beat of silence, and then: “So hear this: take a break!”

“I’ll take care of it,” Bellamy’s deep vice said.

“Still hearing.”

Clarke started walking faster, trying to reach the Council’s tent before being interrupted, but didn’t have such luck. Bellamy had longer legs and the tent wasn’t close to the lab, so it wasn’t long before she heard his footsteps only a few feet behind of her.

“You _do_ need to take a break, you know?” he commented, matter-of-factly.

“I’ll rest when I’m dead.” She had meant to make a joke, but it came out too serious, and Bellamy was at her side before she could add anything else.

He grabbed both her wrists, making her stop and face him. “You don’t need to work until you drop,” he said, his stone borderline exasperated. “I know you were working since the morning, and that you are always working at night, too. The village won’t fall apart if you stop long enough to sleep for eight hours, you know?”

“Eight hours?” She laughed. “That’s way too much.” But, again, her joke came out wrong. Maybe she _was_ too tired to keep going.

Bellamy’s jaw clenched a little. “I’m serious. You have to stop.”

He was looking at her with knitted brows, his face alight by the village’s golden street lamps. It reminded her of the day, weeks ago, when he had come back to her life and trowed himself at her arms, as if it was the only place safe enough to crash and burn and die. Seeing his worry made something in her stomach turn and melt, and she found herself giving in.

“Ok. I’m stoping.” She turned her hands between his and showed her exposed palms as a peace offering. “There, I’m not working anymore. What now?”

A boyish grin she remembered from past lives appeared on his lips. “Now we go for a drink.”

The closest foodcourt was almost empty, as if the dark winter night had pushed everyone inside their tents and cabins, but the fire still burned bright in the pit. They sat side by side on the ground, as close to the fire as they could get, steamy cups of warm cider and plates full of stew on their hands.

Bellamy held his cup on the air. “To finally having a break,” he proposed, and she tapped his cup with hers before taking a sip.

“Didn’t you have a break in your three years here?” she asked, full of curiosity, as they ate.

He eyed her for a moment before turning back to the fire. “You can’t relax when you are tying to survive,” he said, brows furrowed again, as if she had managed to forget that detail.

“I know. But don’t tell me you didn’t have a minute to yourself in all that time.”

“I mean, we weren’t trying to save the human race for once, so that was nice, but it wasn’t a walk in the woods, either.” He played with his food a little, the fork sinking in the vegetables and coming out empty. “At first we were tying to get back, then we were trying to find the second Stone, then we were trying to survive…” He sighed, his shoulders slumping forward. “And then Gaia got pregnant, and that was another adventure on its own.”

“Are you two close?” Clarke asked, unable to contain herself.

Bellamy smiled a little. “I guess we are now, yes. We were the only ones from Earth, and I was the only one who knew how to deal with a pregnancy, so we spent a lot of time together.”

“The big brother in you stepped in, huh?”

“I guess it did,” he laughed. “I was more than ready to help her out, but I can’t explain how relieved I am that I don’t have to deliver another baby. I had my fair share with O.”

Clarke joined his laugher, then asked: “And what about the others? Are they as odd as they seem?”

Bellamy chewed thoughtfully. “No. I mean, they _are_ a little strange, but once you get used to it, they are ok.” He filled his mouth again, chewed and swallowed in silence, and she did the same. “Max is cool,” he commented. “Doucette is more problematic.”

“Is he, now?”

“He was the worst when we first got here, always talking about that Shepherd nonsense,” he continued. “He judged me because I wouldn’t let go of my people, you know? He said that that kind of love was selfish and destructive, and the reason why humanity is the way it is… Cadogan brainwashed them good.” He shook his head in disbelief, then sighed deeply. “But eventually we started to get along. You know how it is, being stuck with other people in an unknown planet, soon you either become friends or end up killing each other.”

“Sounds familiar.”

Bellamy looked at Clarke with a somehow shy smile, an expression she hadn’t seen in a while. They exchanged a knowing glance, remembering the time when they had been the ones who didn’t get along, only to become indispensable for the other later down the road.

“And what about Maximus?” she asked. “For what I know, there’s a long way between being a Disciple and having a child.”

Bellamy seemed lost in thought as he turned his head back to the fire. “Gaia and Max were alone for some time before we ran into each other. By the time we met, they were kind of together already… or something like that. They are disgustingly happy.”

“Yeah, I noticed.” Clarke placed her empty plate on her side, pushed it a little away so she could move around as she pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them, her cup still in one hand. “It must’ve been hard to be separated from everyone for so long, not knowing if you’d ever get to see them again.”

Bellamy frowned at her. “Clarke—” he started, but she interrupted him:

“I had that at least, after Praimfaya. I trusted that you had made it to the Ark and that the Bunker had resisted the death wave, and that it was only a matter of time before we’d meet again.”

There was a moment of quiet hesitation during which Clarke fought the urge to look at Bellamy, her eyes focused ahead instead. She didn’t know if she _wanted_ to face him. Every time they talked about that particular time apart, his face turned impossibly sad, and now she felt bad for bringing it up.

“I, too, somehow knew you’d be ok, that you’d be safe,” he said, his voice low and tentative. “It didn’t mattered that I wouldn’t get to see you again, as long as you were alive. And I knew you’d make it. After all, you survived Praimfaya when I left you to die.”

Clarke chose to ignore the way in which he was talking about _her_ , as if he had thought about _her_ on their time apart, and not about _everyone_. Instead, she went for an annoyed tone, the best one she could manage without being actually annoyed: “Don’t say that, Bellamy. We’ve been over it, already.”

He shrugged. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able of letting it go completely. It’s like you with me dying.” He nudged her shoulder with his elbow. “I can see you watching over me all the time, as if I’m about to disappear.”

Clarke tried to excuse her blush with the heat of the fire. “Sorry.”

“It’s ok. It’s normal, I think. We are not used to not being at mortal danger, and it’s ok if it takes us a while.” He looked at her then, and Clarke forced her head to turn towards him, too, her eyes quickly finding his. “But we have to try and get there, ok? We have to learn how to be at peace.”

Clarke nodded, knowing that her words would come out strangled if she attempted to speak. She breathed in, then out, the smell of the burning logs smoothing her senses. She swallowed the rest of her cider on a big gulp, letting it warm up the remaining cold spots in her body.

“You know what’s the strangest thing about peace?” she said, placing the cup next to her plate. “There’s no ‘ _us_ versus _them_ ’ anymore. It’s just us. There’s no one to fight, only to reason with.”

“Diplomacy seems a better way of dealing with things than violence.”

“Sometimes.” She rested her elbows on the ground and threw her head back, half-laying on the dusty floor. “But most times I’d like to point my gun at Mor and force some common sense down his throat.”

Bellamy’s strong laugher filled the cold air. He finished his drink and then joined her on the floor, laying flat on his back and looking at the starry sky above. Deciding not to think about all the dust her hair was going to collect, she did the same, and so they laid side by side.

Their silences had always been different from others, filled with feelings and understanding rather than unsaid words or uneasy emptiness. Clarke felt content, right then and there. She would have a million things to do in the morning, and her weeks would always be chaotic, but it was worth it, as long as she could get tiny fragments of tranquility next to Bellamy.

They had never gotten a chance to experience peace together, Clarke realised, and it hit her hard on the chest. She didn’t know who she was, nor who Bellamy was, away from the sound of war-cries and spilled red and black blood. She was about to tell him about her discovery, but she had barely opened her mouth when he said:

“Tell me about Madi. How is she? I promised I’d come by sometime this week, but I couldn’t. Do you think she’ll be mad at me?”

Clarke’s previous frown melted away. “I don’t think so,” she said. “She’s been talking about you all week.”

“Really?” Bellamy turned to his side and rested his head on his hand, so he was facing Clarke. She turned her head towards him, and their eyes met somewhere in between.

“Yes. It’s a little annoying, in fact. I already know how awesome you are, don’t need my teenage daughter reminding me of that all day, every day.”

Bellamy’s cheeks turned red, and Clarke made a mental note to remember the precise look on his face forever.

“She thinks I’m awesome?” he asked, voice thin.

She smiled at him fondly. “She _idolises_ you. I guess it’s my fault for raising her on all those stories.”

Bellamy returned her smile, laying back on the ground a moment later. They were closer now, their shoulders touching, the heat from his body radiating to hers.

“How’s she doing at school?” he insisted. “She was homeschooled her whole life, right? Between being a nightblood and then…” He elbowed her again. “I’m choosing to believe that you gave her some kind of formal education.”

“Of course I taught her things!” Clarke exclaimed, elbowing him back. “I’m not a nerd like you, but I did my best. She knows how to write and read and add and multiply, thank you very much.”

“I’m just messing with you.” He laughed, placing one hand in the back of his head. “I can’t believe you called me a nerd.”

“You are _such_ a nerd.” She looked at him for a moment, explored his relaxed profile and the lingering smile on his lips. “She’s doing fine. Complains a little now and then, but it’s normal. I’m grateful that she gets to have her own life, even if it’s still weird, having to share her with more people.”

“I felt the same way about O when we got to the Ground. I was used to it being just the two of us, and suddenly we had to deal with a hundred dangerous criminals.”

Clarke huffed. “We weren’t dangerous criminals.”

“Of course you were! And you were the worst of them all.”

Clarke settled better on the ground, wiggling until her cheek found his shoulder. She managed to convince herself that she had gotten closer to him because she was cold and he was warm, and that resting her head on his shoulder was a perfectly normal thing to do with a close friend in times of peace.

"At least we have more things to talk about, now that we are not together all day long,” she said, going back to the topic of Madi. “But teenage girls are so… weird, don’t you think?”

Bellamy chuckled. “Tell me about it.”

Clarke kept on saying: “I swear I wasn't that way, and either was Madi, until she met her friends. The other day she told me that one of the girls introduced her to the concept of soulmates, of all things, and now she’s convinced that you and I—” She stopped herself right on the edge of the cliff, the words halting as she sucked in a breath.

For an endless second, all she could hear was her throbbing heartbeat on her ears.

Bellamy had stilled next to her, the muscle under her head frozen in time and space. Clarke tried to find a way of getting out of that mess, tried to think how she could twist her own words, or change the direction in which the phrase was going.

But before she could think of anything, literally _anything_ to say, Bellamy asked, his voice barely a whisper against her hair: “That you and I what?”

“No, nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s silly, teenager stuff, it’s not—”

“That you and I what, Clarke?”

She bit her lip. There were a million ways the rest of their conversation could go, there were a million alternatives. But they had never lied to each other before, and, in the end, she guessed there was no harm in telling him the truth. After all, they were Madi’s words, not hers, and it was indeed a silly, teenager thing.

With a nervous laughter camouflaged as a sigh, she confessed: “She thinks we are soulmates. I know it’s stupid…“

Bellamy’s body regained its movement then, his head sharply turning towards her. Her head was still on his shoulder, and she had to stretch her neck in an unnatural angle to face him. The moment their eyes met in the dim darkness, Clarke regretted the instinct that had led her to look back at him in the first place, because he was staring at her with a deep, concealed gaze that she couldn’t, for her own sake, bring herself to identify.

“I don’t think it’s stupid,” he said at last, his voice almost as deep as his eyes. “I don’t think it’s stupid at all, in fact.” His free hand found hers somewhere between their bodies, and his fingers caressed her knuckles. For a split second it seemed like he was trying to smile, but couldn’t accomplish it at the end. “Look at everything we’ve been through. We’ve seen entire civilisations crumble to the ground and we’ve traveled across the stars, and yet again and again we’ve found our way back to each other.”

He looked between sad and hopeful, if such a conflicting emotion could be felt by a human being. Clarke would’ve wanted to hold his hand, to tell him that everything was ok now, that it was going to be ok from then on, but she couldn’t gather her thoughts, let alone her words.

Was he saying what she thought he was saying? Did he think about her in the same way she thought about him?

Bellamy’s following words came out in a whisper, his breath condensing in a small cloud in the air between them. His gaze was so intense that Clarke was sure he could stare right into her bare soul as he said: “I don't think causality and chance work that efficiently.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!! Thank you for reading this far!
> 
> Clarke and Raven’s relationship improved A LOT since coming to Earth II, ok? I hated what s5-7 did to Raven’s character, so I hope you enjoy their dynamic now.  
> I told ya you were getting some Bellarke content on this chapter, didn’t I? Was that conversation way too long? Most definitely. Do I regret it? Hell no. And I hope you liked it, because there’s much more from where that came from!! Two dorks running around their unconditional love for each other is one of my favourite tropes, and it fits Bellarke so well for some ~mysterious~ reason...
> 
> Thank you again for reading. See ya soon! Xx Le Sirène


	11. We can haunt each other's dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Highlight: “‘I’m fine,’ Clarke said, wondering why did she say that phrase so much, when it was so far from the truth.”

Clarke had always considered herself to be a smart, resourceful person, which couldn’t be very far from the truth, given that she had saved the human race a couple of times and had also survived an Apocalypse on her own. But she was having a hard week, ok?

On Monday, the hydraulic system that powered the village had broken down, and all the activities had to be stopped for the next couple days so they could fix that. On Thursday, one of the new animals —Doucette had baptised them “lambs”, even when they didn’t resemble the original lambs at all— had somehow escaped the pens and ran loose on the main street, causing _havoc_ , which, _yeah_ , Clarke could understand, because the lambs had sharp talons and strong legs, and anyone would’ve reacted the way New Polis' villagers did then they saw them running wild.

All things considered, Friday hadn’t been that bad. Clarke had to deal with a few sick patients in the hospital, because people refused to acknowledge that their long, long fall was over and they were in need of more layers of clothing. Oh, and _that one_ was another problem to be solved: they needed extra clothes and blankets and wood to keep the houses and cabins warm, and they needed to finish new houses as soon as possible, because the tents wouldn’t be enough against the colder winter nights.

Saturday had been another level of annoying, because Eligius’ delegate, a very inconvenient woman named Sal, had come out of the blue to check on the lambs. Unannounced visits were against the General Council’s rules, but the woman had assured that it wasn’t an oficial visite, but a social one. Nevertheless, she had asked for a full tour of the new house-complexes and the pens and the barn and the attached construction where they’d cure and salt the meat. She had asked a million questions and she had shown a lot of interest on whether Indra was coming back or if Eligius should consider Clarke as New Polis' leader from then on. Fortunately, Sal had left on the afternoon’s boat back to Eligius’ settlement, because otherwise it would had meant that she had to stay around the whole week, and Clarke wasn’t sure if she could have resisted the urge to feed her to the lambs.

Sunday had been _glorious_ , in Clarke’s opinion, because no one worked on Sundays, so no one had hurt themselves, no one had called in sick, and no one had broken anything important. She had slept in, eaten a generous lunch on the nearest foodcourt, and then had slept some more.

But Monday, once again, wasn’t being nice to her.

Mor had invited her back to the pens, because they were about to place the barn’s roof and he wanted her approval before starting the process. Clarke didn’t know much about construction, but went along anyway, because that was the head of the Council’s job, after all.

They were standing on top of the barn’s wooden skeleton, both her feet planted on the broad beam that was going to support the roof, when the most embarrassing thing Clarke had ever experienced happened: she slipped.

One of the constructors had caught her swiftly as she fell, so nothing dramatic beyond a twisted ankle had happened. But the problem lay in the fact that they were standing in the middle of the open field, people working all around them, and everyone had seen her.

And that wasn’t the worst part, because Clarke could’ve dealt with a little, silly thing as almost falling from a tall building. It could happen to anyone. The embarrassing, _deeply embarrassing_ thing had been the reason why she had slipped in the first place: Bellamy had waved at her.

Oh, she felt _so stupid_.

Clarke had been avoiding him for a week or so now, ever since they had talked about the possibility of them being soulmates or whatever. She had allowed him to walk her home, and after that she had been tiptoeing around the village, doing absolutely everything in her power to avoid running into him. It had been borderline impossible, given that Bellamy had guard duty on the Council’s very door day in and day out, but she had been able to avoid being alone with him, had avoided talking to him beyond professional matters.

Only a few days ago she had been complaining about teenage girls, and now she, a full grown up woman, was acting like one. It had been a very hard week indeed.

As soon as she was standing back on her feet, Mor made fuss over her. He commanded the worker who had caught her to escort her back to the safety of the ground, and then had complained about the beam not being wide enough or strong enough or something. She couldn’t quite catch his words, being otherwise too occupied in overthinking herself to ashes as her cheeks kept warming up and up.

Bellamy had waved at her from the barn’s side, where he and Nate had been talking and pointing at the village’s external wall, but now he was at the foot of the stairs that she had climbed to get to the roof, his skin pale and lips clasped in a straight line. The look on his face might had been laughable, if it wasn’t for the worry that filled his eyes.

“Are you ok?” he asked as soon as the constructor placed her on the ground.

“I’m fine,” she answered, not meeting his eyes. “Just an accident, nothing to worry about.”

“Nothing to worry about?” One of Bellamy’s hands closed around her shoulder. “You almost feel form a two-story building!”

“I’m fine,” she repeated, taking one step backwards as she stirred in his grasp, trying to get loose without being too obvious. But as soon as she rested her weight on the twisted ankle, a hiss escaped her lips.

“You are hurt.”

Before she could deny it, or make up an excuse, the hand on her shoulder traveled to her back, and another appeared at the back of her knees. A surprised gasp left Clarke’s lips as Bellamy picked her up in his arms, his face coming too close to hers for comfort. Their eyes inevitably met, and seeing his worry up-close almost made her forget about her previous embarrassment. _Almost_ , that is.

Her face felt like the foodcourt’s bonfire —every place in which his hands met her skin felt like it was _on fire_.

Bellamy turned towards Nate, who was standing a couple steps to his right. “I’ll take her to get checked,” he told his boss. “Be right back.”

“No!”

A moment of hesitation passed, all the eyes and ears on the fields focused on them. Clarke hurried to untangle herself from Bellamy’s arms, her feet hitting the ground as softly as she could in the rush. He looked so surprised he couldn’t even question her irrational reaction to his kind offer.

“I mean— I’d rather have Miller take me,” she exclaimed, and the two guards exchanged a look. “Walk me to the hospital, I mean. I’d like to consult… something. With him.” Goddamned it, she was being so _pathetic_. “Walk with me?” she asked the man in question.

Nate looked beyond confused for a moment, his eyes darting back and forth between Clarke and Bellamy. “Ok,” he said at last. “I’ll walk with you.” He turned to Bellamy, who was still standing too close to her, his breath like a whisper on her shoulder. “You are in charge until I get back, don’t mess up.”

Nate offered her his shoulder, which she circled with her arm as he circled her waist with his own, and she tried her weight on the twisted ankle. It wasn’t that bad, she should be able to make it to the hospital with no trouble.

She started walking without glancing back at Bellamy, or Mor, or anyone in the fields, her eyes glued to the ground as she let Nate drag her across the place.

A loud, sharp whistle was heard, and the sounds of work resumed.

“So, what was that about?” Nate asked as soon as they reached the village’s first buildings.

“What do you mean?” Clarke asked back, her voice one octave too high.

He laughed, as if her nervousness amused him. “Come on! When have you refused Bellamy’s help before?”

“Just so you know, I’ve refused his help plenty of times.”

They walked in silence for another full minute, forcing their bodies to move in sync.

The streets were full of people, full of noises and activities, and in another context it might have improved Clarke’s mood to see everything going smoothly. But no problems to solve meant that she would run out of excuses to avoid Bellamy in the near future, which, taking into account the soulmate’s incident and now the falling-from-the-roof and refusing-his-help one, equaled to him coming to her as soon as he was free.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Nate said, his voice less commanding than before, “but is everything ok between you two? Bellamy’s been acting kinda weird lately.”

Clarke had been containing a sigh ever since Bellamy had tried to carry her to the hospital in his arms, but now she found herself releasing her breath in one fluid motion.

“I don’t know,” she confessed, knowing better than straight up lying to the person who was helping her in a moment of need. “Nothing happened, but…” The wind carried away the rest of her sentence. “I don’t know.”

“I’m sure you’ll work it out,” he said, a soft smile on his lips as they reached the hospital’s entrance. “You always work it out.” He removed the arm that held her waist, signalling that that was as far as he would go.

The hospital’s hall wasn’t as full as it had been in the previous days, but Clarke still waited for a moment before crossing the entrance. Instead, she turned to Nate, an apologetic smile on her pale lips.

“Thank you,” she said. “For helping me, for—” It looked like she wouldn’t be able to finish that sentence, either.

“Any time,” he replied, already starting to make his way back to the fields.

Standing on her good foot, Clarke watched her friend depart, the golden sunlight and the floating dust swallowing him as he walked away. If she could only command the ground to swallow _her_ for a couple of days, until everyone forgot about her slip. If only.

The first aid room Clarke had been placed in was as clean as it could be, and a white lightbulb illuminated all of it’s corners, leaving nothing to the imagination.

The hospital was the only building besides the lab that had electricity. When Raven had informed them that it would take a few years, or even decades, for the whole village to be powered up, it wad been a no-brainer to choose which buildings would get electricity first. So now Clarke sat under the lonely lightbulb, her legs extended on top of the wooden cot as Georgi tightened the bandage around her swollen ankle, and then cut the gauze with a pair of scissors that, like most of New Polis' tools, had seen better days.

“You’ll have to slow down for a few days,” Georgi informed her as she put the equipment away. “One week, at least.”

“I’m fine,” Clarke said, wondering why did she say that phrase so much, when it was so far from the truth.

Georgi’s lips pursed, as if she was trying to keep the words from leaving her mouth. Clarke could relate.

“Still, you should get some rest,” the healer insisted. “We don’t have the resources to properly steady your ankle, so you mustn’t force it before it’s ready.” As she started rolling down the bottom of Clarke’s pants, her fingertips brushed the thick scar tissue that circled her calve. “This leg’s been through enough,” she commented, and Clarke couldn’t help noticing that those words held more meaning than what they seemed.

Clarke swung her legs to the side so they hanged from the cot’s edge. She was facing Georgi now, the lines across the woman’s forehead and around her eyes deepened by the harsh white light.

“I’m going to be fine,” Clarke assured her. “I know how to handle a little pain.”

Georgi busied herself with the remaining gauze, rolling and unrolling it between her slender fingers.

“Are _you_ all right?” Clarke inquired.

The healer’s eyes finally met her patient’s, and she could see in them a shade of worry she hadn’t seen directed towards her before. What was it with New Polis’ inhabitants and their constant worry about every move Clarke made and each decision she took? She got it, she was in charge again, and she didn’t have the best record at being in charge, she _knew it_ and would never, ever forget it. But did her current position of power actually worry them _that_ much?

“I’m good,” Georgi said, putting the gauze aside. “But I guess there’s something I’d like to discuss with you.” Taking Clarke’s silence as her cue, she continued: “The hospital’s been awful busy since we opened it. We didn’t have as many patients in the provisional tent, you know? Guess the building seems more trustworthy.” She sighed. “Even though we are training people, winter is approaching, and the first babies are being born, and the constructors and the hunters, even the farmers get hurt or sick everyday… We are short-staffed,” she concluded, her shoulders rising and falling with another sigh.

Clarke stared at Georgi as she tried to make some sense of the monologue. “Do you want to recruit more people? We could—”

“That’s not what I’m asking for,” Georgi interrupter her. She clenched and unclenched her ands on her lap. “I want out of the Council.”

Clarke could feel her eyebrows rising on her forehead, her eyes widening in surprise, and Georgi noticed them too, as she hurried to add:

“Everything’s better now. When Indra was here, we had so much work to do, but now I feel like I’m waisting time over there, when I could be healing people here. I know nothing about leading, but you do it so well.”

Clarke wasn’t sure if Georgi’s words were an actual compliment or if she was trying to get away from the Council with empty flattery, but she didn’t stop to dwell on that. Her mind was racing, trying to see _how on Earth II_ should she manage the situation. As far as she knew, Georgi had never shown any desire of dropping the Council while Indra was in charge. Was it actually because of the hospital, or was she trying to get away from the Council’s tent before the whole thing crumbled to the ground? Was her leadership _that_ unreliable?

“Indra _will_ come back,” she assured Georgi. “She said she’ll come back as soon as Gaia gives birth. It’ll be another couple months, thee months tops.”

Georgi smiled a little, but Clarke couldn’t identify what it meant. “I know, and I bet she’ll be mad at me when she comes back, but I can’t keep working there. My duty to the patients comes first. You were a healer once, I’m sure you understand what I’m saying.”

_Of course_ Clarke understood. She would’ve given anything to be stationed in the hospital instead of being in charge of the whole _fucking_ village, but she _couldn’t_ do so, because no one else —absolutely _no one else_ , apparently—would do it in her place, and they couldn’t go about without a leader.

She kept staring at Georgi as the woman stood from her chair, the smile still on her face. Clarke couldn’t believe the _audacity_ , the utter lack of _shame_. How could she turn her back on the people that depended on her? How could she turn her back on her _duty_ —

Then it hit her: Georgi was in her right of dropping the Council. And so was Clarke. This was a free, brand new world, and they could do whatever the hell they wanted. They weren’t tied to any job, to any place, and they could do as they pleased, as long as they did something that gave back to the community.

“I’m not dropping right away, of course,” Georgi said as she neared the door. “I’ll stay for another few weeks, while you look for a replacement, but I don’t think it’d be necessary. You make such a good job on your own,” she repeated. And then she was out of the door, just like that, as if she hadn’t dropped a bomb at Clarke’s sore feet.

Clarke was _angry_ and _upset_ and _annoyed_ , which wasn’t a healthy cocktail of emotions to feel, even less when she was confined between her house’s four walls.

Two days had passed since she had almost fell from the barn’s roof, since her conversation with Georgi, and she was ready to start climbing the walls like a spider in the absence of anything better to do. Nate was going to come by in a few hours to drop off the day’s reports, and then she’d have something useful to do, but for the time being she was stuck inside and she _loathed_ it.

Clarke sighed deeply, relaxing the grip on the pencil she was holding. She had thought that a morning of drawing might’ve been the antidote to the poison she felt cruising through her veins, but, looking down at the grotesque trees she had sketched, it wasn’t being of any use.

She stretched her back and her arms, then did the same with her legs, rotating her injured foot as lightly as she could. As long as she didn’t stand on it, the ankle seemed to be fine, but Clarke would’ve rather had it hurt like hell all day long, instead of this. If she was going to be deemed useless, it might as well be because of a fatal wound, and not a stupid twisted ankle.

Oh, how much she hated everything right now.

The doorknob shook and turned, catching Clarke’s attention, and in the other side of the threshold appeared the face Clarke adored most in the Universe.

"Hello!" Madi's voice chimed happily as she walked in, followed by a chorus of other three young voices that repeated _hello hello_ as they entered the house.

Madi and her three friends, Lila, Freya and Uma, filled the place with their animated chatting and scandalous laughter. They made a heterogeneous bunch, the four of them. Lila was short and her red hair caught the light as if it was on fire. Freya was taller than most of the girls and boys their age, with slender limbs and a thin frame. Uma still held some of the chubbiness of childhood in her rounded cheeks, and had beautiful, long dark hair that her mother —she was one of the few kids who had a biological mother— braided in complicated patterns. And then there was Madi, the life of every party, looking at Clarke with those big, bright eyes of hers.

“We have to make a project for school,” she explained. “Is it ok if we stay here? Or are you working?”

Clarke felt her lips drawing a smile on her face for the first time in ages. “It’s fine, I’m not working.”

“Awesome.”

The girls followed Madi into her bedroom, and even when they closed the door Clarke could still hear their voices talking about everything and nothing. She honestly doubted how much work they were going to accomplish.

Clarke started the painfully slow process of getting on her feet. If Madi was out of school, it meant that the morning had been over for a few hours now, and she hadn’t even noticed it. _Good_. The faster time went by, the less she would have to wait for her ankle to heal.

She was going through her kitchen’s small pantry when she heard a knock in the door. It turned out to be Nate, bringing her the day’s reports, and now she’d be able to bury herself among problems to be solved and people to be helped. Her day was getting better and better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Thank you for reading this far!!
> 
> Can we all collectively hate Georgi for like two seconds? Thank you. Poor baby Clarke, she doesn’t know what to do with herself. But I promise better things are coming soon… like very soon. So stay tuned for more!
> 
> Se ya!! Le Sirène Xx


	12. Sanctuary (part I)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Highlight: “Clarke Griffin, you are hereby released from your Council duties until further notice.”

Despite being the early morning, the sky was covered with bright orange clouds that made it look like a beautiful, rich sunset, and the air was thick and humid, the last vestiges of last night’s rain. The ground remained damp, too, and Clarke’s boots splashed in the puddles as she limped her way across the main street and cursed under her breath.

She guessed the whole thing would’ve been kind of embarrassing, if everyone hadn’t been so focused on their own tasks. It took her longer than usual, of course, but still managed to get to the Council’s tent before the first meeting started. It was her third day on bedrest, and she felt confident enough to go back to work, even if it only was to attend the meetings and sign the day’s orders and the usual reports. She needed to feel productive, useful, or otherwise she might actually end up climbing her house’s walls.

It surprised her when she found Bellamy inside of the tent instead of posted outside, but maybe it was for the best. If he was in the meeting, then they would only talk about work. Contrary to her belief, he hadn’t come to her on the previous days, which was both a curse —because she was worried her overreaction had scared him off or hurt him in some way— and a blessing —because if he’d come by the house she’d have nowhere to hide, and she still didn’t feel confident enough to face him.

All the current Council members were sitting around the table, but they had changed their usual positions. Bellamy was sitting in the place Nate usually took, Nate sitting at the head of the table now, as if he was going to lead the meeting.

Upon seeing her arrival, Nate’s face paled. “Oh, _hell no_.”

Clarke raised one eyebrow at him. “Excuse me?”

“What are you doing here?” he inquired, rising a brow of his own. “You’re supposed to be resting.”

Clarke tried to shift her weight from one foot to the other, but couldn’t stand on the injured one for long. She crossed her arms defensively, instead. “I hurt my ankle, not my head. I’m ready to come back.”

Nate rolled his eyes. “You are exhausted! You almost fall of the barn’s roof the other day!”

“It was an accident,” she insisted. She would’ve liked to take a few steps ahead, to walk to him so they could talk eye to eye and not from several feet apart, but she would’t risk it limping in front of all those eyes, so she stayed by the door.

“But it could’ve been fatal,” Mor said, _not helping_ , as per usual.

“They’re right,” Thea, of all people, commented, her face impassive. “You should take more days off.”

Georgi limited herself to nodding in silence. And Bellamy remained silent as well, his eyes fixed on Clarke but his face blank of emotion.

Despise her friends and advisers’ best efforts, she still tried, one last time, to get away with it: “But—”

“That’s it!” Nate’s hands hit the table’s surface as he stood up. It wasn’t harsh, but it was a movement sharp enough to get everyone’s attention. “Clarke Griffin, you are hereby released from your Council duties until further notice.”

“ _What?_ ”

“I swear, if you keep complaining, I’m going to have you arrested.”

She scoffed. “Under what charges?”

“Professional negligence. I don’t know. Whatever. You’ll take a full week off, starting _now_.” Nate’s eyes surveyed the room, as if defying the others to object. Georgi was the only one who looked like she wanted to complain, but held her silence. “Bellamy, you are on guard duty. You’ll see that she takes it easy.”

“What in the—”

Nate raised one finger at her. “ _Shush it._ ”

Clarke felt her teeth clenching, her jaw tight. There was no use in trying to get the others to help her, because no one would meet her eye, and the only ones who did were decided on not giving her a chance to defend herself.

It was _absurd_ , really. And it made her blood _boil_.

She had slept plenty on the last days. She had deep-cleaned every room and surface on her house, had cooked and had sewn and had drawn. She had even stared at the ceiling and had counted the streaks on the wooden beams that held it in place. She had bored herself to death; she had _rested enough_.

But she knew those arguments wouldn’t work with them. Nate kept frowning at her, Thea and Bellamy remained impassive, Mor smiled that stupid self-assured smile of his, and Georgi was incredibly interested on her own nails. No one would take her side, this time.

“Fine!” Clarke said at last, refusing not to have the last word even when she was losing the fight. “Do as you please. Take over, whatever. But let me do _something_. Don’t take bigs risks without consulting first. If it ever gets out of hand, call me.”

Mor’s laughter, strong like thunder, filled the room: “Don’t worry, Clarke dear, we’ll handle just fine.”

Bellamy walked her back to her house. He didn’t offer to carry her this time, didn’t even offer her a helping hand, which she took as the biggest show of mercy and understanding she could think of. She felt like she’d start trowing fumes out of her ears any minute now, her brain overworking itself to the edge.

Bellamy, who had been suspiciously quiet during the meeting —or the _open attack_ , if you asked Clarke—, remained like that until they were at her door. He opened it for her, and then got inside without asking for permission. Not that he needed it, of course, but Clarke was still trying to avoid talking to him, so it would’ve been nice to shut the door on his face and to be left alone with her thoughts for a while, so she could spiral in peace.

But she didn’t have suck luck, because as soon as they were out of the village’s earshot, he said: “Miller’s right, you know? You need to take better care of yourself.” And then he fixed her a glance that held a million other words: _you are being reckless and incoherent and you need to_ calm down.

Clarke sighed as she sat at the table, placing her injured ankle on an empty chair. “I guess.”

“No, he _is_ right,” he insisted. “You could’ve hurt yourself back there, but I can see that you are not—” He shook his head. “You don’t look so good.”

Clarke was so startled her jaw, tightly clenched only minutes ago, fell to her chest. “ _Woah_ , thank you.”

He sat opposite to her, held her stare. “I mean, you look like you are about to pass out. All the time. And you can’t have a full conversation without starting to talk about work.” He made a pause, inhaled deeply. “You amaze me, Clarke. You truly do. No one else could've accomplished what you did here. But you _can’t_ keep pushing yourself like this. It’s not —It’s not healthy.”

If she hadn’t been in her own house, if she didn’t have an injured ankle that deemed her useless, she would’ve stormed out. This was exactly what she had been avoiding: direct confrontation. She had never chickened away from a fight before, had always stood her ground, but right now it was too much. One too many emotions were coursing through her body, her head was about to explode and she felt like _screaming_.

For days, weeks, months, _years_ , she had been keeping it to herself, all the burden that came with leading. But lately it had been too much. Because _before_ she had been preoccupied with urgent, deadly matters, and everyone wanted to survive those things, so everyone helped. But with peace also came the complaining, and the bickering, and the _pushing_. Everybody wanted something from her, everybody wanted her to be in charge, but only on their own terms.

“You know what?” she said, loosing all her cool. “Everyone tells me to relax, to take a break, but I can’t do that! Because the moment I let my guard down, something bad happens.” She clenched her fists on top of the table, looked at Bellamy right on the eye. “And I know today’s problems are nothing compared to the things we’ve faced, but they still exist, and I still have to take care of them. So when they tell me to relax, I know it will only take _a second_ for things to start falling like fucking domino.” She clenched her teeth, now, trying not to loose her _mind_ in the process of venting. “They say ‘relax’ and all I hear his ‘let us make a mess that you’ll have to clean up by yourself’.” 

It was Bellamy’s turn for his jaw to hang loose. He opened his mouth a couple of times, no sound coming out of it, as his brows met on his forehead. She dared to say he looked perplexed, but then a wave of courage overcame him, his shoulders squaring, his gaze strong and determined.

“I understand the situation,” he said, voice firm but tone tentative. “I truly understand. But you can’t push me away every time you are stressed.” Before she could react, he kept on saying: “You take care of them, and I take care of you, remember? That’s the way it was, it’s the way it was always supposed to be.” His hand creeped across the table and neared hers, but stayed there, within reach but not touching. And that was their thing, wasn’t it? Almost within reach, _but_. “I wasn’t around for a while, and I’m sorry for that, but I’m here now, see? I’m here. Let me take care of you.”

Something inside of Clarke’s chest, maybe her heart or her lungs, or perhaps both, shrunk with a painful spasm. Bellamy’s eyes had been so strong and intense only a second ago, but now he looked hurt. Maybe all that time of running away from and around of him hadn’t disturbed only her everyday life, but his as well. Maybe she had hurt him in the process of avoiding getting hurt.

After all the progress they had made, she had still managed to push him away. And now she was hurting him, and at the same time she was herself wounded, despite her best efforts, and she wanted to make things right, wanted him to be the one who take care of her, and it looked like he wanted it, too. He had always been the one person to choose her first, to protect her while she took care of everyone else— of course he’d be the one to take care of her in a moment of weakness. But she didn’t know how or where to start crossing the bridge that separated them.

She tried to lighten the conversation, to assure him that she was _fine_ , because maybe acting as if she was ok was the first step towards sanity: “There’s no need of taking care of me, Bellamy. It’s _them_ who need saving.”

And there it was, the most dreaded word on Clarke’s vocabulary. Because at the end of every single day she was still the saviour, still the fearless and cold-blooded leader, still the fierce and mighty Wanheda. She was still all they had, who they relied on. No one ever let her forget that, and then they resented her for taking the job too seriously, for making the calls no one else wanted to make. She couldn’t take one step out of the line, slip one time, take a _fucking_ break, she couldn’t—

Bellamy stood up, circled the table in two strides, and kneeled at her side. The situation felt strangely familiar, as if they had been there before, in some other life, some other world.

“There’s no one left to save, Clarke, don’t you see?” he whispered, brows furrowed. And then he got impossibly close, looking so desolate that what was left of her damaged heart broke all over again. “They are already safe. They are safe.” He took her hands on his, his warmth wrapping around her coldness. “ _You are safe._ ”

The air left her body, all at once, a small whimper escaping her as well.

Clarke couldn’t help it anymore. The accumulated stress, the accumulated worry, the accumulated happiness and relief, even, the accumulated emotions and impossible decisions and lonely nights crying or overthinking herself to sleep, everything piled up on her chest and broke the dam that had kept her in check up until that very moment.

She broke down crying.

And Bellamy held her on his arms as she became undone.

It was amazing, truly _amazing_ , the way in which they could always fall right back into each other as if all was well in the world. And for the first time ever, that statement was close to being true, apparently.

The world, for once, wasn’t on fire. There were no wars to fight or Apocalypses to avoid, and all that was left was _them_ , Clarke’s shaking frame and Bellamy’s strong embrace. Maybe it was time to let all things go, to stop letting the past win the hand, to allow the present and the future to be better. Maybe it was the time for difficult, personal conversations, of admitting that her best friend could also be her soulmate, and not run away from the emotions that reality stirred inside of her.

It was a time of healing. And healing could, sometimes, be a little painful.

Clarke cried on Bellamy’s shoulder until there where no more tears left on her, clinging to his body like it was a lifeline.

She had shed more tears since arriving to Earth II than she had in all her life, but it had never left her feeling as relieved, as free. She could feel the knots on her back getting looser, the pain on her chest becoming smaller and smaller, her worries being pushed back and to the side, a sense of serenity overcoming everything else.

After what felt like forever, Clarke loosened the grip of her arms around Bellamy’s neck, but found that he kept holding on to her tightly.

“Better?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Do you want me to let go?”

She shook her head, her arms wrapping around him once again.

“Thank you,” she said on his ear after a while, her voice hoarse. “Guess I really needed to get it all out.”

“Anytime,” he laughed, then cleared his throat. “But let’s not make a habit of it. You shouldn’t let things pile up like this. Come to me sooner next time, ok?”

“Ok.” Clarke sighed, breaking the embrace to she could look at his face.

Her hands remained on his shoulders, and so did one of his around her waist. But his other hand came to cup her cheek, his thumb grazing under her eye to dry the remaining tears. It was a caress so delicate, so intimate, that her skin got covered by goosebumps. In another life, that would’ve been her cue to break the contact, to run away as swiftly as she could, but now she remained put, her eyes fixed on his face as his examined hers, his thumb caressing her flustered skin.

“Thank you,” she heard herself saying, once more. _For saving me, for holding me, for being in my corner, for coming back to me._ Clarke was pretty sure she would never be able of thanking him enough, but she could try. “Thank you for helping me.”

Bellamy chuckled. “Thank me by taking it easy, will you?”

She placed a hand on top of his, trying to cover her sheepish smile. “I can promise trying.”

It had taken a lot of threatening on both hers and Nate’s side, but they ended up agreeing on her going over the day’s most important matters, if only to let her be a little happier with the otherwise miserable situation. One of Mor’s men had come by after dinner to drop the reports off, and Clarke was reading about the latest hunting party when her attention was caught by the rustle of a chair being dragged through the floor.

“What are you doing?” she asked without looking up.

“I’ll stay with you until you finish.” Madi said, siting in the chair oposite to Clarke’s.

“It’s late, you should go back to bed.”

“I’m not tired.” Madi placed both elbows on the table and then rested her head on her hands. “I read very fast. I’ll help you.”

Clarke was about to insist, but she guessed there was no real point in arguing. Madi was old and responsible enough to stay up late if she wanted to. So she went back to work, and Madi started to go trough some of the papers scattered on top of the table.

It wasn’t long, though, before Clarke heard a quiet snore coming from the other side of the table, and when she looked up she found Madi completely asleep, her head resting on her forearms now. The sight made her smile, and then laugh a little. Madi always had the best intentions at heart, but she was still a child.

Clarke stood up and then helped her daughter do the same, waking her up enough so she could walk the few steps back to her bed. She tucked her in and planted a kiss on her forehead, like she used to do when the girl was just a child, and was about to leave when she felt a hand grabbing hers.

“Wait,” Madi said.

Clarke sat next to her on the mattress. “I’m here.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something.” Madi managed to sit with only a little effort. “Would you consider… maybe… since you can’t work right now, to go on a trip? We’d be back before you are clear to work again.”

Clarke tried to hide her surprise, but was pretty sure she failed. “What?”

Madi fidgeted with her blankets, not meting Clarke’s eye. “Luca’s birthday is on Saturday, and I kind of promised that I’d be there.”

Clarke wanted to laugh, but acted against it. She had almost forgotten about Luca, Madi’s not-boyfriend, who had settled on Sanctum with the rest of his people.

“I don’t know if I could take a long-week break, even when I’m on bedrest,” she answered carefully.

“Not even for me?”

Clarke looked at her daughter with the most neutral expression she could compose, but in return Madi was giving her those huge puppy eyes of hers. She was pretty sure that, no matter how much she grew, Madi was always going to try to blackmail her with the puppy eyes.

She wondered when would that cheap trick stop winning over her heart.

“I’m going to regret this _so_ much, but yeah, I can take a break for you.” When Madi squealed in excitement, she added: “But only for _one_ week, ok? And that only because the boats only travel once a week.”

“Awesome!” Madi exclaimed, trowing her arms around Clarke’s shoulders. “Bellamy’s going to be so happy!”

“Bellamy?”

“Yeah, I told him we were going to Sanctum and I asked if he’d like to join, since he’s nannying you.”

Clarke pulled her daughter away from her embrace so she could face her once again, her brows furrowed. “Madi, you can’t do things like that, out of the blue. Maybe he had plans—”

“Plans to what? Staying here, all alone, and _working_?” Madi interrupted, rolling her eyes in a manner that was so exaggerated that Clarke couldn’t even stay mad. “I think he’ll appreciate our company very much.”

And of course that Bellamy, award-winning friend-of-the-millennium was more than glad to join them on their trip. The following morning Clarke asked him a hundredth times if he was sure, and a hundredth and one times he assured her that he was, in fact, sure.

“Besides, if I come along, you won’t have to deal with Murphy on your own,” he said.

And so it settled it.

They packed their bags, and Clarke gave the Council explicit orders to come get her if anything happened, and she promised both Jackson and Georgi that she wouldn’t push herself and would rest her ankle as much as possible. Raven and Mor’s right-hand woman were asked to aid the Council as external advisers, just in case they needed some kind of backup, and that was that. That was as much beforehand work and organisation Clarke could get done before Saturday morning arrived.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!! Thank you for reading this far!!
> 
> I feel like this fic consists of people telling Clarke to chill out, but I honestly think this is what would happen if they ever got to have peace. And I’m sorry for the struggle, but I needed to shake Clarke one more time before she finally let it all go. And so now she’ll start anew.  
> On the next update we’ll have Sanctum’s gang as especial guests! Let’s see what Murphy, Emori and Jordan have been up to, shall we?
> 
> See ya soon!! Le Sirène Xx


	13. Sanctuary (part II)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Highlight: “This planet just didn’t feel right without the two of you together to wreck it.”

Despite the rowers’ usual warnings against it, Madi jumped out of the boat as soon as it hit the shore, her shoes splashing on the sand. Without more preamble, she sprinted towards the village, quickly disappearing behind the trees that lined the beach and hid Sanctum from sight.

Bellamy looked at Clarke with raised eyebrows. “Should we go after her?”

She shook her head. “She always does that.”

The rest of the crew —which only consisted of the both of them, and the two rowers— disembarked with more care, and they helped the workers unload the boat before starting making their way to the village, both if their bags hanging from Bellamy’s back, because he had made her choose between him carrying her bag or him carrying her _and_ her bag, and she had chosen the first option.

“We came here a few times since settling,” she told him as he walked and she tried to hide her limp. “Sanctum’s full of kids, and they live more… even _more_ peacefully, I guess. Like they did back in Sanctum, remember? Minus the bodysnatching, of course.”

Bellamy’s lips pursed. “That’s a relief.”

“All the Primes and their tech are gone now,” she added, feeling like she should explain further. “There’s no fear of them ever coming back. Murphy and Emori took off the chips, and so did Gabriel. And he —he destroyed all of them. For good.”

Bellamy nodded, his gaze fixed ahead, and remained quiet as they walked. 

The forest over there was less thick than the one they had in New Polis, there was more space between the tree trunks and the ground was less crowded, with fewer leaves and twigs and rocks blocking the path. And it was a good thing, Clarke thought, since she couldn’t peel her eyes way from Bellamy’s face and the way in which the morning light bathed his features. And also because her ankle was far from healed, and it would be _very_ unfortunate for her to injure it further; she was pretty sure Miller would actually place her under house arrest if she came back in worse shape than she had left in.

Bellamy looked tranquil, and of course, since there were no threats nor deadlines nor lives that depended on them, as he had assured her himself. But there was something else lingering on his face, the very same shadow that she had glimpsed weeks ago, which even the morning light couldn’t erase. It had gotten lighter since their reunion, but some of it still remained, and Clarke couldn’t help feeling both curious and anxious about it.

She guessed that trip would be a time as good as any to ask him about his years alone on Earth II, but at that exact moment they reached the forest’s end. Bellamy smiled, then, and Clarke could feel her own face mimicking his expression, her worry melting away quickly.

Sanctum looked a lot like their previous village had looked like, with colourful buildings and colourful clothes, the streets adorned with flowers and candles and little things their inhabitants had rescued from their previous homes. In comparison with New Polis, that place looked almost modern, almost bright. But Clarke couldn’t help being moved, once again, at how small the village was.

There was a handful of houses to the right, and another handful at the left, and in the middle they had a big, open space, that worked as the Local Council’s meeting spot, and as the village’s trading post, and as the school’s playground, and as their main food court. New Polis had agreed to come and give them a hand with construction as soon as their own village was finished, but now Clarke thought that maybe Mor could —after _hours_ of persuasion— spare some people to come over and help them before the colder months arrived.

Madi was currently standing in the middle of the open space, a flash of golden fur wiggling happily at her feet as she scratched its stomach. “I’ve missed you too, buddy,” Clarke heard her daughter saying. Around her gathered a group of Sanctumite adults and some kids who greeted Clarke and Bellamy when they joined Madi’s side.

Clarke couldn’t help noticing the looks on some of Sanctum’s villagers, who were staring at Bellamy with parted mouths and wide eyes. She realised that some of them must remember him from his time in the original Sanctum —hard to forget the face of one of the people who brought down your entire belief system—, but most of them might not know that he was alive.

Bellamy’s death had caused great commotion on all of Earth’s survivors, since he wasn’t just a good friend to all of them, but also one of their leaders. It was normal that Sanctumites remembered him, and that they had heard of his passing, but not about his resurrection. Or not-death. For some reason, Clarke herself still struggled with that, too.

A familiar face appeared amongst the others, and a loud burst of laugher filled the chilly morning air.

“Dear God, aren’t you _tired_ of living? You should’ve stayed dead, that’s always the smart thing to do.”

Bellamy snorted. “Good to see you, too, Murphy.”

John Murphy, in the flesh and the nightblood, embraced Bellamy in a strong, exaggerated hug, patting his back stronger than necessary, in Clarke’s professional opinion. But the receiving end didn’t seem to mind, as he patted Murphy’s back with the same enthusiasm. Clarke would’ve liked to roll her eyes at them — _men_ —, but the smile on her lips only grew.

“What brings you to our humble home?” Murphy asked, turning to give Clarke a fond hug now, being a hundred times more gentle with her. When he pulled away, he still held her shoulders, his eyes surveying her face as if he was looking for something hidden on her skin.

“We’re chaperoning Madi,” Bellamy said, eyebrows raised.

“She’s here for Luca’s birthday,” Clarke added, gesturing towards her daughter, whose hand was still buried in Picasso’s fur. “I hope we’re in time for the party.”

Murphy shook his head, that gesture of disbelief he always held close to his person. “I’m sure you are, it’s too early for parties.” He waved a hand towards the buildings at his back. “Follow me,” he said and started to walk past the handful of people that still lingered around. “Emori will be happy to see you.”

And Emori was, indeed, very happy to see them. Or very happy to see _Bellamy_ , to be precise, but Clarke couldn’t blame her. She knew that they had become close friends on the Ark, and the wide smile on his lips told her that he was just as glad to see Emori, too. It did something funny to Clarke’s insides, seeing Bellamy so happy amongst old friends. It almost made her wish she had gone to Bardo with him, wish she had witnessed his reencounter with Octavia, if only to feel a little bit more of the warmth that currently nested on her stomach.

Murphy and Emori lived in a small cabin made of wood, like most of their buildings, but inside they had a wide arrange of things that hadn’t come from Earth II nor from the original Sanctum. Clarke inspected some of the trinkets and furniture around the place and identified Bardo’s signature phoenix all around, but it didn’t come as a surprise for her. If anything, it made her a little jealous, because they had fluffy pillows and elegant, not-grounder-looking clothes.

“How long are you staying?” Emori asked after she invited them to sit on their small living room. She and Murphy took two chairs, while Clarke, Madi and Bellamy managed to fit in the small sofa.

“A week,” Bellamy answered, tone as relaxed as his face.

Clarke hurried to intervene: “I’m so sorry that we didn’t send notice sooner! Madi came up to me just a couple days ago and I didn’t have the chance to—”

Murphy waved a hand at her face, making her stop her rambling. “It’s ok,” he said. “ _Mi casa es su casa_ , you are always welcome here.” Before Clarke could even be toughed by his words, he kept saying: "Besides, leading gets so boring after a while, and seeing the people’s faces back there was hilarious. They looked like they were seeing a ghost. Which,” he gestured to Bellamy, “ _fair_.”

“Oh, fuck off—” Bellamy cut himself short and looked at Madi with an apologetic smile, and in return she laughed at his expression.

“No, I mean it,” Murphy insisted, placing his elbows on his knees. “We didn’t spread the word, so I’m sure they thought the fucking Shepherd resurrected you or something.” He turned to Emori. “Can you believe it? We’ll have to deal with a new wave of fanatics because this one just couldn’t stay dead.”

Bitting her lip and rolling her eyes, Emori slapped his shoulder. “Don’t joke about that. I’ll go explain later.”

“You better do,” he said, “because I will _not_ have this crazy fuckers thinking they can start bringing people from the dead _again_. I’ve had my fair share of Second Comings with this two.”

“Come on!” Bellamy exclaimed. “As if you hadn’t survived impossible odds on your own, Mr. Cockroach.”

Murphy snorted, resting his back on the chair now. “I always survive because I’m just that awesome.”

Once again, Madi laughed and Emori rolled her eyes. And when her eyes met Clarke’s, almost by chance, the grounder gave her a wary but kind smile.

They had never had a particular relationship, always bonded over people the both of them cared about, but never bonding themselves. However, during the last months they had started to build a mutual respect, chatting more and more with each of Clarke and Madi’s sporadic visits to the village, and Clarke thought they could be considered more friends than acquaintances, nowadays.

“We didn’t know if you’d have available space for all us to crash, so we brought our own tents,” Clarke said out loud, trying to put a stop to Murphy and Bellamy’s teasing bickering and also trying to be the best guest possible. “Maybe we could place it behind your house, and we could borrow your bathroom?”

“You offend me, Griffin,” Murphy scoffed. “You know we have a spare room.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t want to intrude. Three is a crowd.”

Murphy shook his head. “We’ll figure it out when the time comes.” He stood up then, releasing an exaggerated sigh. “But for now, who’s hungry?”

There was something in Sanctum that soothed Clarke’s senses, for a reason she honestly could not understand, given her history with their former religion and leaders. But it might had to do with the pastel colours of their clothes, or with the easiness on their children’s laughter, or with the fact that none of their adults were trained assassins, warriors, or criminals, or all of the above combined. She had had a rather disgusting experience with the Primes, but Sanctumites themselves had been rather kind to her, given everything.

She was back on the communal space now, basking in the sun while Murphy and Emori showed Bellamy around. She would’ve joined them if it wasn’t for her ankle, which was throbbing after her short walk in the woods from earlier. So she laid sprawled in a chair, her leg extended in front of her, and silently begged that none of the children running around tripped over it.

Sitting in the shadow of the trees and shielding from the sun, Madi, Luca, and all of their friends were celebrating the birthday party that had led them there on the first place. The group giggled as they ate and chatted, and Madi looked like she was having the time of her life, which translated to Clarke having the time of her life as well, despite being alone with a stubborn ankle and absolutely nothing to do.

Without her even noticing, her mind started to wonder around, and she found herself thinking, once again, about Bellamy’s lingering shadow. She pondered the reasons why it existed, and came to the obvious conclusion: he had spent three years away form everyone he cared about, and all that jazz. That was an easy one. Now, why did that shadow _remain_ , weeks after he had been back?

He had been met with a lot of surprises, as he had told her himself: Octavia was living amongst strangers, and had settled down with one of those strangers; Echo had broken up with him to be with Hope, who was another stranger to him —and a paradox all in herself—; and he had yet _again_ to adjust to an entire new world, had to face the fact that his friends had build lives of their own, had to find his place in said world and said lives. He had told her about all of that, and she had assured him that he _did_ had a place, right next to her.

Maybe he was looking for something else, for a life of his own? Clarke couldn’t help feeling a little guilty for the way in which he had been forced to nanny her in the first place, and then had been dragged to Sanctum, because he was only human and of course he hadn’t been inmune to Madi’s puppy eyes. His life had somehow ended up wrapped around hers, once again, when he had every right to want to go on his own path.

She knew right then wasn’t the best moment to point all of that out, because they were going to spend the whole week together, but she was going to bring it up as soon as they were back home and he was released from nannying her.

And she also knew that all of that didn’t actually answer her original, most burning question, _what did that shadow_ actually _mean?_ , but she’d also leave that for later, because both of them deserved a week of leisure and because she had her ankle as an excuse. She had no way of running after him if she upset him, and she always felt better when she had the chance of at least _trying_ to run after him.

An actual shadow grew around Clarke, blocking the sunlight, and a voice said: “You know what? I literally can _hear_ you think. It’s exhausting.” She looked up and saw Murphy claiming the chair right next to hers. “What’s up?” he asked.

“Just enjoying the sun.”

“Yeah, and throwing fume out of your ears.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“You so are.”

Murphy looked around mindlessly, and she followed his gaze. Emori and Bellamy were near the construction that Clarke knew to be the school, talking to a woman draped in a bright yellow shawl.

“For real, how are you doing?” he insisted, his eyes finding hers. “How’s everything over there?”

She shrugged. “I’m fine, I guess. I’m suspended from the Council, though.”

“ _What?_ ”

“It’s a long story. I almost feel from a roof, hurt my ankle, refused to rest, and Miller made me take a break _or else_.” She shook her head in Murphy fashion, all disbelief and resignation. “But New Polis is doing fine, besides its best efforts to fall apart.”

Murphy laughed between his teeth. “I never thought I’d see the day in which Clarke Griffin took a break.”

“Me neither,” she sighed. “What about you?”

He shook his head in _Clarke_ fashion, refusing to drop the previous subject until he was satisfied with his answer. “We’re brilliant, don’t you see? Now, back to you taking a break: about damn time.” He laughed, and Clarke laughed, too. Then, he gestured towards the school with his head. “How’s everything with Baby Jesus? Tired of him yet?”

“ _Baby Jesus_? That’s what you are going with?”

“I have a million nicknames for him, been thinking ever since I knew he was alive.” He scratched his chin, then his head, then his neck. “What a way of pulling a _you_ , huh? I swear I almost had a heart attack when I saw his handwriting on the letter.” Clarke snorted, to which he insisted: “I’m serious! Ask Emori, I thought I was going to pass out, at least.”

Clarke bit her lip, giggling a little longer. “Yeah, me too,” she admitted at last. “For a moment I thought I was finally losing it. But—” She sighed, sinking lower on her seat. “It was so _surreal_.”

Murphy eyed her carefully, his hands fidgeting with a piece of golden grass. “I get that it sill feels surreal?”

Clarke turned her head back to the school, and found that the unknown woman was gone and Bellamy and Emori were talking on their own now, looking like they were having a rather serious conversation.

“Yes,” she answered, a tiny smile on her lips as she saw Bellamy’s small frown from afar. “I still feel like I’ll wake up one day and find that it was all a fever dream, and that he’s still gone, dead. I’m trying to enjoy it while it lasts.”

“You are not hallucinating, Griffin.” He nudged her elbow with his own. “Good things happen sometimes, too, you know? He’s alive, he’s back, and he’s making a fuss all over you, as usual.”

She didn’t have it in herself to start a new bickering contest, so she limited her answer to snorting and closing her eyes, allowing the sunlight to cover her face.

“He deserves to have his own life,” she ended up saying, against her better judgement, because she couldn’t let his last remark linger in the air, as if didn’t weight just too much.

“You’ve always been a huge chunk of his miserable life, I have six years of him being a mess as undeniable proof,” Murphy shot back, somehow mixing a lovely statement with his usual edge. “I’m sure he’s just as happy to have you back.”

Her smile, apparently forever hidden somewhere in her face ever since Bellamy’s return, grew slightly, but she turned her face in the opposite direction, trying to hide it from her friend. But she guessed it _was_ true, after all: they had always been a _huge chunk of their miserable lives_ , whatever Murphy meant by that.

His voice, and his extremely surprising question, brought her back and out or her own mind: “And how’s your head dealing with his return and everything?”

Clarke considered her words for a moment, eyes still closed, partly because she was enjoying the sun and partly so she didn’t have to face him as she answered: “It was hard at the beginning,” she admitted with no shame, because Murphy had always understood the twisted parts of her mind in a way no one else could. “Like I said, it still feels kind of surreal. And we were separated right when he came back, and I thought I wasn’t going to see him so soon… But then he came back.” She made a pause and cleared her throat, her voice thinning at the end of the sentence. “He’s been helping me a lot. He knows how to keep me centred, and how to calm me down.”

“What about the nightmares? The drowning yourself in work? Is he helping you with that?”

She nodded, then said out loud: “I haven’t had nightmares in a while, now that you mention it. And yes, he’s helping me breathe from time to time, trying to lighten the burden. It’s— It’s always been our thing.”

Then there was another moment of silence, the sun gentle on her skin and the breeze caressing her cheeks with a cold but welcomed bite. She heard the party still going at her right, and Murphy shifting on his seat at her left. When she felt his tentative touch on her forearm, she opened her eyes to find him looking at her with a gaze that just too _gentle_ to be in his usually mocking face.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he’s back,” he said, voice low as if he was sharing a secret with her, “but I’m even more glad that he is back at your side. This planet just didn’t feel right without the two of you together to wreck it.”

Clarke felt the start of a giggle, or perhaps a smartass come back for his very last comment, on the back of her throat, but then realised it was the start of a sob. She blinked a few times, tried placing her eyes somewhere else, but she kept coming back to Murphy’s face, to the small, almost invisible smile on his thin lips.

At the end, she gathered herself enough to offer him a tiny smile of her own. He was right, the bastard. He was absolutely right: nothing had felt right until Bellamy had clawed his way back to her side.

When their paths crossed later that day, Madi was absolutely ecstatic about the party’s aftermath. One of her closest friends had invited her to sleep at her house for as long as she stayed in Sanctum, and Madi was so excited that Clarke couldn’t find in herself the heart to deny her wishes. She was going _so_ soft, it was a problem, but one she could face, if it resulted in Madi’s happiness. Besides, she already knew the kid’s parents, knew she had like four siblings and that Madi wouldn’t disturb the house’s dynamic that much.

“If I see that I’m bothering them or something, I’ll talk to the other girls,” Madi assured Clarke as she picked her stuff up from Murphy and Emori’s. “Theresa said that she had wanted to invite me over, as well, but Sue got to me first.” She fixed the strap of her bag in her shoulder, her hair getting tangled with it. “And I can always come here if no one else will have me, which I doubt.”

It still amazed Clarke the way in which Madi could literally befriend a rock. After living half of her life hiding and the other half with Clarke as her only company, she now surrounded herself with tons of kids her age, she talked to and was friendly towards everyone. Maybe she was like that _because_ of the way in which she had grown up, and not _despite of_ it, but she seemed to enjoy herself, either way. Clarke knew that kids’ friendships were usually lighthearted and that it would take Madi some more time to find the people she actually wanted to call her friends, but again, she seemed to be enjoying herself and her popularity for the time being.

So off Madi went to her friend’s house, exclaiming _thank you thank you_ as she made her way a couple doors to Murphy and Emori’s right. And so off Clarke went to join hew own friends in the only bar in all of Earth II that served Monty and Jasper’s moonshine.

She found them sitting in the very back of the place. Murphy had his arm around Emori as she talked with Bellamy, who was sitting across from her and with his back at the door; to his right was an empty seat. Between the vacant chair and Murphy, sitting at the head of the table, was Jordan.

He looked older than the last time she had seen him, which both surprised her and filled with a strange sort of pride.

“Hi! Clarke!” he exclaimed, being the first to see her approaching. He even stood from his seat to give her a hug that reminded her so much of his father’s that she had to take a deep breath before releasing him. “It’s so good to see you! I’ve missed you so much.” And there it was, that childish edge to his persona, that unapologetic kindness and honesty that came more from his parents than from his extraordinary life experience.

“It’s good to see you too, Jordan. How have you been?”

She claimed the seat on Bellamy’s side, comfortably chatting with Jordan as he told her about his last months, his misadventure with a poisonous kind of berry, and his latest bioengineering discoveries, which she couldn’t understand but listened to anyway.

“I found this algae that glows in the dark, and I was thinking maybe Thea would like to—”

“Ah!” Bellamy jumped in, interrupting his conversation with Emori so he could interrupt theirs. “Clarke’s not allowed to talk about work until further notice.”

Jordan’s brow creased in a way that resembled Harper so much Clarke didn’t know if she should laugh or cry. “Why?” he asked, looking absolutely baffled.

“She’s taking a well deserved break,” Bellamy said, placing a hand on top of hers, which already was on top of the table.

“That’s one way of putting it,” Murphy mumbled under his breath, but no one pushed on the matter.

They called for a waiter, instead, and ordered a round of moonshine.

“It almost tastes like my dad’s,” Jordan told Clarke and Bellamy, beaming as his eyes jumped from one of them to the other and then to their still joined hands. “I’ll get the recipe right, someday, but it’s good for now.”

Murphy grinned. “It still amazes me that Monty taught him to make moonshine before he could even properly function in society.”

To Clarke’s surprise, Jordan scoffed at him. “Someone had to bring some fun to the party. Suppose Planet Alfa was empty, who would’ve given you booze?”

“And that’s why Monty was the smart one,” Emori said, and the conversation was put to a stop as the waiter came back with their order.

Clarke took a small, tentative sip, and welcomed the familiar burn at the back of her throat. It _was_ almost like the original recipe, she recognised with a smirk.

It had taken all of them a lot of time to be comfortable talking about Monty and Harper again, and most of all to talk about them in Jordan’s presence. Upon a lot of reflection, Clarke had come to the conclusion that they hadn’t been the best supporters for him, back then they first met. They could excuse their behaviour on their need to face yet _more_ deadly threats and unwelcoming hosts, and in the fact that Jordan was already a young adult when they met him, not a child, but she knew it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t right. So, seeing him doing well on Earth II meant a lot to her, to all of them, and to his parent’s memory.

The first few months had been really hard for him, Clarke knew, but he seemed to be doing so much better now. He was back at smiling, back at asking questions, and back at laughing carelessly, his eyes always gentle and sympathetic.

Bellamy’s body shifted next to hers, and she heard his low whisper on her ear: “He reminds me a lot of Jasper, for some reason.”

Clarke turned to him, the others occupied with their conversation. At first, she frowned, not really getting the point, but then Jordan rolled his eyes at Murphy, and she could see it clear as day.

“You are right,” she whispered back, surprised by the discovery. “But we shouldn’t tell him, it’ll get to his head.”

“You are right,” he repeated, an amused smile on his lips. “Last thing we want is a prank war or something like that. Remember how the last one went?”

The burst of laugher that escaped her lips made all the heads on the table turn to her, teeth shinning in white as they smiled at her, some giggling involved as well.

“What’s so funny?” Jordan asked.

“Nothing,” Clarke and Bellamy replied in unison, which had them both scandalously laughing again.

True to himself, Murphy rolled his eyes. “Typical,” he mumbled, but even between the tears that clouded her vision Clarke could see the little smile that lingered on his lips, which he tried to hide behind his glass.

The night went on along those lines, sharing anecdotes and food and more drinks. Bellamy found himself repeating for the hundredth time the talle of his adventures on Earth II along his unconventional companions, and Clarke discovered that none of them where surprised when he informed them about his breakup with Echo and her current relationship with Hope.

“It would’ve surprised me more if they didn’t get together, actually” Emori said, her tone apologetic.

Jordan nodded a couple of times.

“Why didn’t I know about it, if it was so obvious?” Clarke inquired.

“Well,” Murphy said, “you were kinda busy saving the human race, if I recall correctly.”

There was a small beat of silence, the sounds coming from the other tables muffled by the weight that settled on their’s. But it lasted only a moment, only a few seconds, and if was broken by Bellamy’s dramatic sigh.

“Typical,” he said, mocking Murphy, but it also sounded as if he mocking all of them, all of their shared history, all of the times in which Clarke had been left alone to deal with the weight of the world on her shoulders. He sounded over and done with it, and, honestly, so was Clarke, at least on a superficial level.

“Well, you know how it is,” she said, trying to sound as casual as she could “someone had to.”

Bellamy nodded solemnly, the galaxy of freckles on his face dancing as he wrinkled his nose. He placed his arm on the back of her chair, the movement so natural that it didn’t surprise anyone who saw it, and certainly not Clarke, who welcomed the proximity.

“Anyway,” she continued, decided to lift the mood, “tell me more about this moonshine of yours, Jordan, and why does it taste like dirt if you leave it on your mouth for too long?”

Murphy almost jumped out of his seat, raising both arms in victory as he exclaimed: “I knew it tasted like dirt!”

“It does not,” Emori said, but Murphy was already engaged in an argument with Jordan.

As she watched the interaction in silence, Clarke felt a small wight on her shoulder, and found that Bellamy had placed the his hand there. She looked at him for a moment, her attention going from the argument to his brown eyes. He didn’t smile at her, that time, nor did he gave her encouraging words or anything like that. He simply looked at her silence, his eyes heavy but also clear, and Clarke looked back at him in the same way. They were fine, they were calm, they were enjoying themselves for the night. No words were needed between them; it had always been their thing, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!! Thank you for reading this far!!
> 
> I hope ya’ll enjoyed your Bellarke with a side of Memori :)  
> John Murphy and Clarke Griffin are besties, ok? Don’t @ me you know I’m right.  
> I was going to give Jordan a hard time but I just couldn’t. Everyone is as happy as they can here! Lets leave the angst (and only a little bit of it) to Clarke alone, thank you.
> 
> I found myself enjoying their stay in Sanctum more than I expected, so there you have 5k words and the promise of some more Sanctumite adventures to come ;)
> 
> That's it for now. Hoped you liked this one! See ya soon! Le Sirène Xx


	14. Sanctuary (part III)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it took a bit, but I wrote 6k. Enjoy!
> 
> Highlight: “But now I understand why they always talked about the two of you as if you were one. As if you were… connected.”

It didn’t take Clarke long to realise she was dreaming, which was a surprising development on itself, given that she hadn’t had a normal, harmless dream in the longest time. Ever since she had been confined in Skybox, her nights had been occupied by messy nightmares or endless darkness, no dreams on sight. But she was dreaming, now. And her dream was _good_ , pleasant, vivid, the colours were so bright— It almost felt like a memory.

She was back on the Ark, her father and her mother were smiling down at her with an easiness she hadn’t seen in a decade, and she herself was at least a decade and a half younger than she actually was. It was her birthday, and all her friends from school were gathered around a table, singing as they waited for her to blow the candles. She was wearing a baby blue dress and had her hair in one short and unruly braid, tied with a ribbon; her face was half-covered by strands of golden hair that had gotten loose while playing and celebrating. Right beside her stood Wells, singing his lungs out. And all around them were their friends, all chubby cheeks and wide smiles, innocent kids, hopeful kids.

She felt so happy, her heart filled with love and her eyes filled with wonder. But that younger Clarke couldn’t help feeling like something was missing, even when she smiled as wide as her face allowed. She kept glimpsing at the door, as if waiting for something to happen, but she didn’t know _what_. She tried asking her father about it, but he couldn’t hear her over the singing.

All of a sudden, the door flew wide open, two small silhouettes appearing at the threshold. An exited squeak escaped Clarke’s lips, and then she remembered: her best friend was late to the party. She waved at him from her spot at the table, the hot wax spilling down the candles and to the cake’s frosting, and ushered him to get to her other side, opposite to Wells.

Bellamy was a couple years older than all of the other kids, and eyes followed him around as he got closer, a small Octavia at his heel. He embraced Clarke in a hug that was a little too tight, and his little sister did the same, and then they joined the signing, and Clarke finally allowed herself to blow the candles. She didn’t have any wishes to make; nothing was lacking, no one was missing. She was absolutely, completely happy.

It took her a moment to gather her surroundings. She was lying on her back, a blanket covering her body and keeping her warm, and her head was resting on a pillow. The room was unfamiliar and dark, only a few rays of sunlight slipping inside from the sides of the thick curtain that covered the window.

A small noice at her left called her attention, and she turned to her side. As soon as she saw him lying next to her, the memories from the last few days came rushing into her mind like the rain swiftly falling on the ground. She could still hear Emori and Murphy’s drunken discussion when they had first said that they didn’t mind sharing a room, back on their first night in Sanctum.

“Of course they’ll be fine sharing a room, ‘Mori,” Murphy had said as his girlfriend half carried, half dragged him to their own bedroom. “They are like siameses, joined by the hip, remember? Joined by the fucking hip.”

Clarke laughed anew remembering the slight uneasiness she had felt the first time she slept by Bellamy’s side after so long apart, and then remembering how normal it had started to feel on the nights to follow. Their week of vacation was nearly over now, and she had started to feel uneasy at the thought of _not_ sleeping by his side, rather than right next to him.

Their sleeping bags where less than an arm’s length apart, the room too small to allow any more distance, but she guessed it was better that way, since it allowed her to see him clearly in the dark. Clarke stared at Bellamy’s sleeping profile, his chest slowly rising and sinking with his breathing, and tried to enjoy the few minutes of peace before the day started. Instead of doing the usual and going over her to-do list, she focused on reviving her recent dream, tried to picture her parents’ smiling faces and Wells’ chubby cheeks so she could draw them later.

But for some reason all she could think of was Bellamy’s chubby cheeks and his rebel curls. How funny; she had never crossed paths with him back on the Ark, had never seen a picture of him as a child, and yet her mind had managed to come up with a clear vision of him, of his smile and his eyes and his freckles in the face of a little kid. She thought, as well, about the worry her young-self had felt when he was missing from her birthday party, and the pure relief she had experienced when he showed up at last. How funny, and how odd. She had spent most of her life not knowing Bellamy, but now her mind couldn’t imagine a reality or timeline in which he wasn’t by her side.

Despite all of her relief and bemusement, it still hurt a little to wake up to find that both her parents were dead and long gone, Wells gone with them. Not for the first, and not for the last time, she thought how much would all of them had liked that new planet, with it’s golden leaves and strange water, with peaceful villages and the hope and resources for a better future. Even after so many years, her heart ached for every single friend and loved one she had lost in the journey.

Her eyes focused back on Bellamy, the friend and loved one she had thought lost along the way, as well. Despite the actual _hell_ they had gone through, she felt grateful that she had always had him by her side. She had been a terrible leader, and an awful friend, and still again and again he had welcomed her back, had offered his shoulder to help her carry the weight of the world, had accepter her every flaw and weakness. They had gone though so much, both together and apart, one two many things had gone wrong, but at least all the roads had lead her there. Right to that moment. Right to his side.

Bellamy’s eyelids flickered, and then both of his eyes opened at the same time. It also took him a second to focus, to recognise his surroundings, but when he did, his face relaxed, and he stretched as he mumbled: “ _G’morning_.”

“Hello there.”

His hand came up to his face and brushed aside the hair that was falling on his eyes. “It isn’t polite to stare at people when they sleep.”

“I was waiting for you to wake up,” she lied easily. She mimicked him and stretched her arms and her legs, quickly curling them back when her feet touched the cold, empty space at the foot of the bed.

“So, what’s on the agenda for today?”

Clarke bit her lip, self-conscious for a fraction of a second. “I was thinking about sleeping in, actually. Since it’s our last day here.” She tried to sound as carefree as she could, but was pretty sure she couldn’t accomplish it.

“Are you talking about just… lying here? With nothing to do?” Of course, Bellamy couldn’t be persuaded by her lame attempt.

Even more self-conscious now, she ran away from his sight, sinking further in her blankets. “Yeah. I mean, there’s going to be a million things to do as soon as we get there tomorrow, you know? I just wanted to rest a little before that.” She fidgeted with her blanket, listening to the silence that followed her statement. “You can go about your day, of course, I’ll just—”

Bellamy’s snort interrupted her. “Peace broke something inside that head of yours, didn’t it?” He laughed, absolutely nailing that carefree tone she had tried to go for. “But I agree with that idea, one hundred per cent. Let’s sleep in.”

Clarke gathered the courage to look up, and found the sleepiness completely gone from his face, an easy smile replacing it. She even felt brave enough to untangle her hand from her sheets, getting it out of the bed and making it travel to his side of the room. He watched her actions curiously, looking a little confused until she brushed aside the curls falling back on his eyes.

“I had a dream about my parents,” she heard herself saying, but wasn’t completely sure why she had chosen to tell him that. His head turned slightly to the side, his attention caught, and for some reason she kept going, her hand still lingering on his hair as she brushed it away from his face. “They looked so happy. I can’t remember them ever being that happy.”

Bellamy’s hand caught hers, and he rested it on his pillow, his thumb caressing her knuckles as his brow furrowed, deep in thought. “Maybe they are at peace, at last,” he said, dark eyes sinking on hers.

“Maybe they are.”

Madi ran into Clarke’s side as soon as she and Bellamy showed up at the last breakfast shift, engulfing her in a too-tight hug.

Her daughter’s independence had lasted a total of two days before she was back to sticking to Clarke’s side as if they, too, where joined by the hip. Madi hadn’t say anything about it and neither had Clarke, but the girl spent most of her waking hours by her side, only separating to sleep and hang with her friends on the afternoons. During the mornings, thought, while all the other kids where at school, Madi could be found by Clarke’s side, the other flanked by Bellamy.

The three of them sat on an empty table, Madi and Bellamy chatting excitedly while Clarke watched them. Their developing relationship still amazed her to her bones, truth be told. They talked as if they hadn’t stood on opposite sides of a war, once upon a time, as if Madi hand’t been raised on stories about Bellamy while he lived in total ignorance of her existence. They were _friends_ , plain and simple, joined by something deeper than Clarke’s relationship with both of them.

“Luca said his dad’s preparing something special for tonight,” Madi said as she stirred her bowl of fruits. “He didn’t say what, though, so it’s gonna be a surprise.”

“Something special like food?” Bellamy inquired.

Madi shrugged. “I have no idea. Could be.”

“I hope it’s that. Sanctum’s food was good.”

Madi opened her mouth to reply, but her eyes traveled somewhere behind Clarke and Bellamy’s back, instead, and she smiled and waved. “Hey!”

A voice said: “Good morning, guys,” and then Emori was circling the table and taking the seat next to Madi. “How did you sleep?” she asked Clarke and Bellamy, “I didn’t see you earlier.”

“We slept in a bit,” Bellamy answered, hands around his cup of tea.

Emori’s eyebrows shot upwards, eyes widening a little. “Long night?” 

Bellamy shrugged. “Nah, just felt like it. Sadly, tomorrow we get back to work.”

That comment ignited something in the back of Clarke’s head. She knew she shouldn’t do it, of course; the reason why they could and had spent the whole week away was that she was forbidden of talking or thinking about work. But she had been bitting her tongue for _days_ now, and couldn’t help it anymore.

“Speaking about work,” she said, ignoring the scandalised glance Bellamy threw in her direction, “how are the blankets and winter attire coming? It’s getting colder really fast.”

“They are coming along,” Emori answered, the previous matter dropped in a heartbeat. “You could take some with you tomorrow, if you’d like. We have a couple dozens ready, but the big load will take at least two more weeks.”

Clarke considered the information, still ignoring the man at her side. “That should do for now,” she said. “We can give some to the elders still living in tents and cabins, for the time being.”

Emori nodded, rising to her feet. “I’ll go prep that, then.”

Madi followed her movements with furrowed brows. “Is there a rush? Don’t you want to stay around for a bit?”

The woman smiled, all white teeth and kind eyes. “It’s work,” she explained, “I’d rather do it right now than later, when I’m busy with something else.” Emori waved at them and started to make her way towards Sanctum’s main building, but before she could get out of earshot she turned on her heels. “Clarke? Could we meet up later, after lunch? There’s something I’d like to… consult.”

“Sure.”

“Great, thanks!”

Emori had taken a total of two steps when Clarke felt something poking at her ribs. She snickered and tried to snap Bellamy’s hand away, but he caught her wrist, making her turn back to him. His eyes were amused but also incredulous, brow furrowed just like Madi’s across the table.

“What about _not working_ doesn’t sit right with you?” he asked in disbelief.

“None of it,” she stated. “We need those blankets and clothing, what was I supposed to do? Wait ‘till we’re back at New Polis to send them a letter?” She saw his lips pursing and insisted: “And it wasn’t strictly _work_ , let me have it.”

He shook his head and rolled his eyes, releasing her wrist at last. “Unbelievable.”

The insides of the main building looked so much like Sanctum’s castle that it threatened to disturb Clarke’s precarious inner peace, so she hurried across it until she found Emori, who was waiting for her at the very back, behind a curtain dyed in yellow and purple, like a bruise.

Emori was standing by a wide, cluttered table, folding blankets and coats and tying them together in chunky parcels. She looked up from her task and welcomed Clarke with one of those smiles of her, far too easy for the life she had lived.

“Thank you for meeting me here,” Emori said as Clarke reached her side.

“Of course. Can I give you a hand?” When Emori nodded, she put her hands at work, folding everything she could find. The blankets seemed soft, the coats thick, and Clarke couldn’t begin to imagine how good they were going to be for her people, back home. “What did you want to talk about?”

Emori looked pensive for a long moment, then sighed and said: “Do you like being a mom?”

She could’ve asked if she’d like to join her new cult, and Clarke wouldn’t have been as surprised. She tried and failed to neatly fold a blanket, taking another minute to gather her thoughts before answering: “Yeah. It isn’t easy, of course, but I love Madi, and I’m finding that, at the end of the day, it’s easier to raise a kid day by day than saving the human race from time to time.”

Emori laughed under her breath, swiftly catching the joke. “But isn’t it challenging, to have to be there all day long, all the time? Do you ever get tired of it?”

“Sometimes,” she admitted. “But quitting’s not an option, so you just take a deep breath and keep pushing.” Putting the now-folded blanket aside and reaching for a new one, she dared to keep pushing on that matter: “Can I ask why you’re asking me this? Did something happen?”

“Not exactly. It’s more like an on-going thing.”

When Emori kept her silence, Clarke decided to drop the subject. They weren’t the closest friends, and she could understand that she’d like to keep some things private, or not share them with her, precisely. Having their own, private lives was one of Earth II’s privileges, after all. But Clarke was proved wrong when Emori started talking again:

“All of our kids are placed in safe homes,” she explained, eyes fixed on her working hands. “We thought we might have some stray, that we wouldn’t be able to pair the orphans with adults who wanted to raise them, but every single one of them has a family now.”

Clarke could relate to the relief in Emori’s voice; dealing with the orphans had been one of New Poli’s first tasks as soon as they had settled, and it had been one of the biggest challenges, as well.

Emori kept saying: “John and I thought that we… That we’d have to take some of them in, eventually. That’s why we built the spare room. But no one’s had any problems.” She cleared her throat. “The thing is— I kind of felt exited when we talked about the possibility of taking them in. I had never imagined myself as a mom; my kind wasn’t allowed to have families.” Clarke’s eyes traveled to Emori’s hands, the good one working nonstop while the other tried to keep up. “But it’s different here. I _could_ be a mom if I wanted to, and…” Her voice thinned, her head shook slowly. “I don’t know.”

Determined to erase the distance that separated them —damned be her insecurities—, Clarke reached for Emori’s hands, putting a stop to their current activity. Their eyes met, first tentatively, then with more conviction, and Clarke managed what felt like a reassuring smile.

“I didn’t choose to become a mother,” she said, tone as soft as she could keep it, “but I don’t regret it. Even when it gets hard, when I feel like I can’t do it, I find a way of keep going. And it isn’t a job as lonely as it seems, you know? Madi gives her best, as well, and I know that you’d have Murphy with you, every step of the way, if you ever choose to have children.” She could feel how the smile started to melt a little on her face, so she hurried to add: “I never thought I’d become a mom, either, at least not this young, not in the world we lived in, but— You are right. It’s different in here, and it’s going to be different for you.”

Emori’s brow was so furrowed that Clarke feared, for a moment, that she’d gone too far with her speech. But one moment later Emori’s hands had dropped the folding altogether, traveling to Clarke’s sides and hugging her tight.

“I’m sorry you had to go thought it alone,” she said, taking Clarke by surprise yet again. “And I’m thankful for your words, really. You are right, I can do this.”

Feeling lighter, Clarke brought her hands around the woman as well, holding her for a moment before they broke the embrace and got back to folding.

“You might want to reconsider your partner choice, though,” she dared to add, bumping Emori’s side with her elbow. “Murphy’s gonna be insufferable if you ever do get pregnant.”

Emori’s laughter filled the room, and Clarke couldn’t help joining. “I’m counting on it. About time someone treats me like royalty again.”

Sanctum looked beautiful during the night, lanterns and lamps alight on every building and column and around the comunal space. They, too, had a pit in between the tables, and the fire filled the air with the smell of wood and herbs, making it rich and thick and warm.

Dinner had been done for a while by the time everyone left the tables and sat around the fire, occupying logs that worked as seatings or sitting on the ground. Clarke, for one, was on the ground, her back rested on the side of a table as she watched Madi and her friends, sitting in the front rows. Before the fire stood Luca’s father and another handful of people, whose surprise consisted on the theatrical reproduction of a story from the Earth, a long time before the bombs but earlier than Bellamy’s tales of kings and conquerors.

From what she could tell, the story was about a man on a mission to some land far away, and it involved a merciless desert and a pharaoh’s tomb and some kind of technological or magical object, she wasn’t very sure. Clarke found it ward to focus on the people in front of her when the one right beside her was a million times more interesting.

Bellamy, as Murphy had predicted, was back at her side. Not even an inch separated their shoulders, their ribs, or their legs. But it was for the best, because it was a cold night and they were pretty far away from the fire, deciding against squishing amongst the Sanctumites and squishing to each other, in turn. And not that Clarke was complaining; Bellamy had always irradiated a heat greater than any fire, and he was way softer, as well, his shoulder the most comfortable place in the Universe to lay her head on.

For some reason —maybe all the moonshine Jordan had managed to make her drink during dinner—, she couldn’t stop staring at him, somehow managing to be discrete. She found him stealing some glances back at her, from time to time, so she guessed it wasn’t such a wrong thing to do, but felt a little silly for doing it, all the same.

Clarke had discovered it some time ago now, but she couldn’t help marvelling at how beautiful Bellamy looked under golden lights. Simply _beautiful_. She couldn’t think of any other word, with his eyes alight by the fire and his freckles dancing with the flicker of the flames. The shadows beyond the clearing drew he smooth curve of his nose, its rounded tip, the shape of his lips and the sharpness of his jaw, and she longed to reach for his face like she had done that morning, to draw him with her hands.

“Do you understand what’s going on?” he asked after what felt like an eternity of silence.

“Not really following,” she admitted, a little relieved by the fact that he had chosen one of the few moments in which her eyes were on Madi instead of on him to start a conversation. “I’ve never been a fan of theatre.”

“Me neither.”

Bellamy turned his head towards her, and she did the same, rising her eyes to meet his halfway. _Beautiful_.

“Can I ask you something?” he said, and she nodded. “Murphy told me that you had a rough time, right before they split the villages, said he was worried about you not being able to… _make it_.”

She knew exactly what he was talking about. The first weeks on Earth II had been the hardest time of her life, and that was to say _a lot_. She wasn’t leading anyone, and Madi wasn’t in a good place, either, from all the chaos that had taken place in Sanctum while she and the others went looking for their missing friends, finding far more than they had expected in the process. The world had been calm but Clarke had felt like it was ending all over again. She had lost her way, for some time, before duty had forced her head out of the water. Maybe that was the reason why Indra had recruited her for the Council, back then, and if that was the case, then Clarke owed Indra, if not her life, at least her sanity.

“He helped me out when I was at my lowest,” she told Bellamy, averting her eyes from his and placing them on the shadowed ground. “Every single day was a struggle, back then. You had just died, and yet _another_ planed had been destroyed on my watch—”

“It wasn’t your fault,” he tried to intervene.

“We had promised we’d do better, but we didn’t— _I_ didn’t,” she admitted, feeling bare and naked before him. But her talk with Emori had made her realise that, even thought she had been alone for the longest time, she wasn’t alone anymore. That one was a new world, indeed. “It was too hard to keep going without you here.” She closed her eyes tight, ready to fight the tears that never came.

Bellamy’s hands, as if they had been as eager to hold her as her’s had been to hold him, traveled to her arms, then her back, and she found her face buried on his neck, his on her hair. It was a natural reflex for her arms to make their way around him, holding him tight in return.

“I’m here now,” he whispered.

“I know.”

“It was hard for me, too,” he said after another moment, his embrace less tight but still firm. “But it doesn’t matter. We are together now.”

“You can talk about it, you know?” she asked. If that was her chance at clearing the nightmares that clouded his eyes, then she was going to take it. “I feel like I’ve been venting nonstop since you came back, but you never talk about your time here. Three years is a long time.”

Slowly, Bellamy retreated back until his back was resting on the side of the table again, but he kept his left arm around her shoulders and his right hand resting on her left forearm, still holding his chest. His eyes were fixed ahead, lost somewhere beyond the performers, maybe beyond the village.

“There’s no much to tell,” he said, voice as deep as his eyes. “There’s not much besides the official story, I mean. We came, we tried to go back, we realised it was impossible, we settled. That’s it.”

“But how did you _feel_?” she pushed, fully aware of the fact that their usual roles had been reversed, with her acting like the heart while he was lost inside of his head. “I don’t want to force you to talk about things you don’t want to, but I can see that something’s bothering you.”

Bellamy swallowed, then shrugged. “It was hard,” he repeated, and because his voice sounded a little strangled, she held him tighter. “It was losing everyone all at once, with no chance at going back. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things I’d regret forever. No chance at telling O I’d forgiven her, or telling Echo that she could move on, or telling Murphy not to be a pain in Raven’s ass in my absence.” The shaky smile that creeped on his lips was sad but honest. “I wouldn’t be able to tell Jordan that Monty and Harper are proud of him, wherever they are, or to see Madi grow up and become the amazing woman I know she’ll be someday.” His eyes, at last, went back to hers. “Or to tell you how proud of you I am, and how happy I am that you are alive, and that— And that I look forward at doing better with you.”

Clarke wasn’t crying, but felt an awfully familiar sting at the back of her throat that told her that she was a few pretty words away from doing so. She fixed her eyes on Bellamy’s, her hands still holding him hight, trying to make him _feel_ and realise that they were alright, that they were together and safe, like he had told her before. He was alive, and she was alive, and they finally had their chance at doing better.

She was about to tell him so when she realised that he was so close she could count the freckles on the bridge of his nose, across his cheeks and around his lips. He was so close that she could feel his warmth swallowing her whole, could feel their chests rising and falling in unison. She was too aware of his breath on her lips and his hands on her body, fingers digging deeper and deeper on her skin with the passing of seconds, as if he, too, had noticed their proximity.

The spell shattered before she could say or do anything, the noises from the outside rushing inside of their quiet bubble and making the air go a little colder. The thing that had caught their attention had been no other than Murphy’s scandalous laughter and the crowd’s cheering as the group bowed, the play finished at last.

Bellamy blinked a few times and took a deep breath that she could feel on her own chest, the pressure of his hands on her body disappearing in another blink of an eye. The hand around her shoulder remained there, but the other one traveled to his hair and messed it further. Clarke also took a moment to gather herself, taking her hands away from him and hugging her knees, instead.

“It’s so odd to see him smiling this much,” Bellamy commented, matter-of-factly, and it took her another second to realise he was talking about Murphy, still laughing at something with Emori.

“He deserves to be happy,” she said, proud at how much her voice _wasn’t_ shaking. “He did so good, back in Sanctum. And he’s doing good in here.”

Bellamy remained quiet for a long time, during which Clarke managed to catch her breath and calm her wild heart, racing in her chest. She forced the emotions coursing through her veins to calm down, as well, because she couldn’t think straight with Bellamy still that close to her, and that one wasn’t the time nor the place to act upon the ideas that were coming to her mind.

“What about you?” he asked at last.

“What about me?”

He cleared his throat. “Are you happy?”

Clarke thought about it, and then felt stupid for needing a moment to think about it. “Sometimes,” she admitted. “More often than not.”

He nodded, sharp. “That’s good.”

“What about you?”

Bellamy also thought about it, his free hand tapping on his jaw while the other held her shoulder slightly tighter. When he looked back at her, she was reassured that, in fact, happiness was more of a constant in her life, nowadays. “Couldn’t be happier,” he said.

Even thought it obviously was a way of saying, because she could name about a hundred things that could be better and therefore make everyone happier, she allowed his statement to make a way into her heart and into her mind and to nest and grow there.

“We should gather the whole gang,” Murphy suggested the following morning. He was leaning agains their room’s doorframe, keeping watch as Clarke and Bellamy gathered their stuff and rolled their sleeping bags. “We haven’t all been together since we split, and now we have an excuse.”

“And what’s the occasion?” Clarke asked.

“Well, Easter, of course,” he replayed, tone so serious that it had her snorting and then breaking on a burst of laughter, which Murphy joined.

“What’s so funny?” Bellamy inquired, looking at them with raised eyebrows.

Clarke composed herself enough to say: “You!” And then she was laughing again. When she thought she was done and tried to stop, her eyes met Murphy’s, and they started to laugh again, tears coming to her eyes and her stomach shrinking until it hurt.

“We would gather to celebrate your heroic resurrection,” Murphy explained to Bellamy.

“It wasn’t heroic. They literally had to drag me to New Polis, and I passed out when I saw Clarke.”

Murphy shrugged. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Whatcha say, then?”

Fully recovered now, Clarke waited for Bellamy’s answer. If he didn’t feel like seeing everyone at once, she would respect it and make sure everyone else did so, too, because she understood how hard it could be to be surrounded by people after being alone for so long. But at the end Bellamy nodded, accepting Murphy’s proposal, and the excitement she had been keeping in line made its way to her smile.

They updated Emori, Jordan and Madi on the matter while they all walked to Sanctum’s pier. Bellamy and Murphy were walking ahead, Emori and Madi at the middle, and Clarke found herself chatting with Jordan. The village was empty and gloomy, most of the people still asleep, and they kept their conversations quiet, voices low.

“How’s that ankle?” he asked.

“I think it’s fully healed, hasn’t hurt on the last days.”

Jordan nodded. They were reaching the forest now, and Clarke focused on her feet as she stepped on the uneven ground.

“And how’s New Polis doing, now that Bellamy’s not here to bite me for asking.”

Clarke smiled to herself. “It was alright when we left, and I can only hope I’ll find it in one piece when we get there.”

“And how are _you_ doing? Better?” he inquired furthermore. “Madi told me that they kind of forced you to take a break.”

She would’ve rolled her eyes if it wad been of any use, but since it wasn’t, she kept them on the ground. “I’m ok, I promise.”

They kept walking in silence for a total of five seconds before Jordan started talking again: “Madi also told me, some time ago now, that you used to tell her stories about everyone else, when you were alone. My parents always told me stories about you too, and, full disclosure, you were kind of my favourite.”

Surprised at the turn the conversation had taken, she mumbled: “I’m not a hero, Jordan.”

He showed her his best impression of Monty’s understanding smile, which was pretty good, in her opinion. “I know. But that’s the thing: you never wanted to be the saviour, you did it because you loved them. That’s what always stuck with me.” He breathed in, then out, as if getting ready to say something even _more_ strange. “But when I finally met you there was a… _thing_ that didn’t feel right about you.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“In every story they told me, Bellamy was always by your side,” he explained, and Clarke could start to place the pieces together, one by one. “And I never got to see it, because first you were kind of not talking to each other, and then the Primes happened, and then Bellamy went missing. But now I understand,” he said. “I understand why they always talked about the two of you as if you were one. As if you were… connected. And why they chose to wake you up first.”

The others had already cleared the forest, and they were a few feet away from the shore when Clarke stopped altogether. She remained silent, the puzzle taking form before her eyes, and then looked at Jordan for the first time in a while.

“I’m sorry you didn’t get to see the best parts of us,” she said, and trusted that he’d understand that her apology extended across months and planets.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m happy we’re here, now. And I just wanted to tell you that I see it, too. I see what they saw in you.” And then he kept walking, clearing the forest and joining the others by the pier.

Still concealed by the tree-trunks, Clarke took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the cold morning air. She could see Madi giving Jordan a fond hug, see Bellamy chatting with Murphy and Emori, hands on his hips as he looked at the workers loading the boat with the parcels she had prepared the previous day. It was a common sight on Earth II, friends saying goodbye and knowing that they’d meet again in no time, but it still moved her.

Proving the theory of them having some sort of connection, Bellamy’s head turned to the forest, his eyes finding hers in no time at all, and he shared with her a look that couldn’t be put into words. It was warm and caring, and it was strong and determined, and despite the distance it made her feel a lot like she had felt the previous night, as if they were the only people there, as if she’d never, ever again, have to doubt that he was alive and well, and she was alive and well, and that it would continue to be like that for a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!! Thank you for reading this far!!
> 
> I’m soooo sorry it took so long to update. Uni’s been dragging me from one place to the other and I couldn’t find a moment to write. But today I said enough and here you have a longass chapter with lots of fluff, as it should!!
> 
> Thank you for your patience. I send you all my love and gratitude for staying around! See ya, Le Sirène Xx
> 
> PS: If anyone’s interested, here’s my twitter account: @2cool4muggles. I talk about updates and future fics/ideas over there, and I also cry about Bellarke and pretend s7 never happened (‘cause it DIDN’T), so it’s a happy, stress-free zone!


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